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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.

I am going to warn you my fair readers, today’s post is going to contain spoilery discussion about the latest Disney Plus series The Book of Boba Fett. At this point two episodes have been released, and I have to admit I have some serious doubts about this show. I find myself vacillating wildly between “I am just not feeling this” and thoughts of “Does this actually sucks?”. This morning I am going to talk through my feelings and thoughts, and since I often times use this blog as therapy… will maybe come to some grand conclusion or at least acceptance after writing all of it.

Firstly I feel like we need to talk about how important of a character Boba Fett has been to me throughout the years. My first action figure of Boba Fett was obtained through collecting Kenner purchase seals and mailing away… then waiting what felt like an insane amount of time before finally getting it into my hands. So my fear going into Book of Fett is that I might be a little too close to the source material. While I realize we are in this weird place of Disney officially exiling all of the content that came from before as “Legends”, Dave Filoni is two years older than I am so very much a child of this era and has been cherry picking the best bits. I rabidly consumed everything that I could get my hands on that was Boba Fett related from the Dark Horse comics to Tales of the Bounty Hunters collection of short stories.

I loved seeing Boba Fett return through the Mandalorian series, but also felt no shock in seeing him. In fact from the onset of that series and the moment that we arrived on Tatooine I assumed sooner or later we would see him. Boba Fett escaping from the Sarlacc Pitt is a well trodden story at this point for me, and while I was uncertain exactly HOW they would portray it… I knew that effectively Boba was still active somewhere. I have this very hard time cloistering everything I “know” from the Legends universe and not just expecting the “Saga” universe to play out in the same manner. So far the parts of the extended universe that worked… are starting to make their way into what is ultimately becoming this new Disney Star Wars Canon.

Seeing Boba Fett with the Tusken Raiders really was not a shocking revelation either. Again because of the vast archives of expanded universe… I know a shocking amount about the civilization of the Tusken Raiders through comics, games, and books and there is a big part of me that has just sorta had this “well duh” moment play out as I am watching Fett so far. It made perfect sense that Fett who always seemed like an honor bound bounty hunter… would fit in perfectly with a society of nomadic people who are also extremely honor bound. In the movies I guess up to this point we have had the Tusken’s portrayed as this roaming band of monsters, but they were always more to me personally. The Tusken’s are just the native race of Tatooine and survived the ecological fallout of the world by adapting to living under extreme conditions.

I think the core problem I am having right now with Book of Fett, is it feels like one of those catch up reels that plays at the beginning of a new season of a Netflix series. Everything that is being shown to me is either well trodden legends content or something that completely makes sense and is a logical sequence of events knowing the characters that are so far involved. What I don’t understand however… is why in the hell Boba Fett has decided that suddenly he wants to be a Crime Lord and thinks that he alone can take on the Hutts. We are spending so much time with flashbacks and covering content that I was more than happy to have hand waved away because it “just made sense” and spending little time so far dealing with what is happening in the here and now. I had hoped that we had dealt with most of the flashbacks in the first episode… but the second episode also largely was comprised with Boba Fett and the Tuskens.

The other core issue I have with Book of Fett is it is missing something that The Mandalorian had. There is this emotional fabric that the Mandalorian had that is just completely gone with Fett. Sure there is a buddy cop sort of relationship going on between he and Fennec Shand, and that is delightful when it is actually allowed to play out. What we instead get is Boba Fett being super confused why no one seems to fear him or respect his authority when he has done nothing really to earn that place of respect. Maybe that is the tale that we are setting up… Fett being overwhelmed and then having to earn his place as the Daimyo. I get the distinct feeling that Fett wants to effectively Unionize the crime syndicate and create this mutually beneficial relationship between him and his vassals. So I can see a redemption arc working if in the next episode he is knocked down hard by the Hutt Twins who arrived at the end of episode two.

I would be lying if I said I was not going to at least finish out this season. Having the appearance of Black Krrsantan was some serious fan service that I did not expect, and I think on some level a lot of this show is just supposed to be Boba Fett looking badass while we drift along on the fumes of “member berries“. I think the problem for me at least is I know Disney is capable of producing great short run series that help flesh out these worlds. Loki and Hawkeye for example were freaking pure brilliance. Similarly I have loved The Mandalorian because it was telling a fresh story in this universe that I love. The problem is so far Boba Fett is not really telling a fresh story but instead reliving bits and pieces of past stories that I already knew. I think Fett should be a lesson to Disney going forward, since they plan on resurrecting pretty much any character that is even vaguely capable of supporting a limited run show. The show has to stand on its own in order to actually be good, and can’t just be the television equivalent of a really cool looking action figure.

I will say Book of Boba Fett gives me serious concerns about how it is going to feel to experience some of these other shows that are coming soon. The Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi solo shows are slotted to release at some point during this year for example. I think the core problem with Star Wars has been that unlike Marvel… they don’t have nearly as much source material to mine. For example if you point at any character in the Marvel Universe… and you can find literally thousands of unique story lines from the comics that expand upon that character. For Star Wars you have a few movies and then a string of books… a good number of which were read by old farts like me who were desperate for ANY Star Wars anything during the dark times. With Marvel they could mix and match and lean heavily on the multiverse theory to craft something that while assembled out of bits and pieces of existing story material… felt fresh and new. With Star Wars… my fear is that these solo projects are all going to feel like this one… with a certain measure of rehash required to catch everyone else up before actually crafting new additional stories. If you have made it to this point in my post… what are your thoughts about Book of Boba Fett so far? Are you also having issues with it, or is this just a “you are too close to the source material” issue. Drop me a line below. The post Does Book of Fett Suck? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

We are now firmly in 2022 and I am getting back into the swing of waking up at a reasonable time again. One of the posts I had originally planned on making before the end of the year was a quick run down of some of the high and low points for the year. That did not happen however because “vacation mode” but I still think it might be an interesting discussion. So here we are dusting off a list that I started as a notepad document. Side note… my machine is littered with tiny text files that I start up and scribble some quick information on and then rarely return to. text files are effectively my digital post it notes.

High Points

The sequence of events that lead to this purchase are so wildly off the wall. In this time of being unable to find a graphics card at all… I happened to stumble onto a boutique pre-built with a 3080… that arrived on my actual birthday… and then somehow convinced my wife to spend an exorbitant amount of money on it. It was a phenomenal sequence of events and I am still overwhelmingly happy with this purchase. My entire gaming rig was from 2015 and while the graphics card had been upgraded… it was getting to the point of just needing to replace everything all at once. This was by far the best possible sequence of events that could have happened.

This year I fell into a lot of nostalgia about Minecraft and more specifically about the hardcore mode that I had never played around with. I recorded a series of me playing Minecraft and while it did not last that terribly long… in fact it pretty much ended spectacularly the first time I attempted going into the nether. I really enjoyed the process of recording these videos and could see myself returning to something like this in the future when I have a fixed project in mind surrounding a game. I mean nothing I do ever really garners a ton of viewers/readers/listeners but it brought me joy to be creating this. Even if only my closest friends ever watched any of it… I am fine with that. One of my favorite things to come out of last year was the project that ultimately got named Mixtape Mondays. Essentially each week I would release a brand new mixtape… and by mixtape I mean a custom Spotify Playlist with album art and a proper name. I had so much fun creating all of these “albums” and I have no clue how many people actually listened to them but I could absolutely see myself doing something like this again. My creativity basically lasted through twenty of these before I ultimately needed to take a very long break. If you are curious about them you can check out the Mixtape Mondays archive page. Folks… I cannot tell you how many times I have attempted to play Dragon Age Inquisition and bounced off it completely. Dragon Age Origins is one of my favorite games, and I have played through it numerous times start to finish. However there was just something about Inquisition that rubbed me the wrong way, and the way the game is structured…. made it exceptionally easy for me to get derailed along the way. I own this game on multiple platforms, thinking maybe I would like it better as a console game… but it took until this year that the game managed to finally grab me. When it did however it did not let go and I consumed every last bit of the experience with fervor. Now this is probably my favorite game in the entire Dragon Age series, but it was a hard fought battle to get there. Really if you had to pin a single thing on this year… I would call it the year of Final Fantasy XIV for me. I’ve never seen a game that was effectively in a content lull… bloom the way that this game bloomed. For me it was getting back in touch with my love of Eorzea and figuring out how to carve out my own goals. This culminated in the launch of Endwalker which is quite possibly the best MMORPG expansion story I have ever experienced. That might be a little unfair to other games however because this was the freaking Marvel Endgame moment for an MMORPG franchise where an entire decade worth of plot lines coalesced into a giant crescendo. Earlier I talked about how Dragon Age is one of my favorite games, but it is very much not my favorite Bioware title. That honor belongs to Mass Effect and I still feel like in spite of not really sticking the landing in the third outing… it is one of the best gaming and storytelling experiences. I would love to see this series turned into a high production value streaming era series. For years I had wanted them to go back and tweak the first game in the series to make it a bit more playable… and that is precisely what the Legendary Edition does among other things. Sure the first game still ends up being more awkward than the later titles, but it is in so much better shape than it used to be and this now serves as the perfect point to return to the series. While I have lost much of my faith in Bioware… I desperately want to see this series continued in a fashion befitting its roots.

Mixed Feelings

I cannot tell you how much I wanted this game to land. Within my own gaming circles we have the group of people for which Destiny really landed and a group for which Warframe grabbed hold. Each time a new looter shooter comes on the market, I keep hoping it will be the one that unifies the camps and gives us a single default game to keep returning to. Outriders could have been that game… but the horrifically bleak story lost a lot of my friends and kept them from even giving this game the time of the day. It isn’t every day you are expected to play through a literal concentration camp with bodies stacked like cordwood. If they ever gave players the ability to jump straight to the endgame… I think maybe just maybe I might be able to convince more of them to try it out. The game is in pretty good shape, but still honestly a little spartan. I am interested to see what the expansion content adds and if it revitalizes things a bit. I love Phantasy Star Online 2, but it also very much feels like you are playing a game from over a decade ago. I had these huge hopes that New Genesis would breathe new life into the game for me and ease some of the hurdles that you are expected to overcome to get into the base PSO2 client. I am not sure exactly why… but I just could not get into the game at all. I am not even certain if I managed to complete the tutorial. Phantasy Star Online 2 got me by on sheer nostalgia by being extremely similar in feel at times to my beloved original Phantasy Star Online. New Genesis was open world in a way that felt awful to me and it didn’t really feel like anything I was doing had much meaning. I might boot this up at some point in the future and give it another shot, but I bounced pretty freaking hard and I am not really sure if it is my fault or the game.

Low Points

I went through one of the most stressful years that I have experienced at work. I dealt with a pretty awful situation that spawned seventy hour work weeks for about two months… and then spent the next six months dealing with the ramifications of those events. On top of that at the end of this year I had my friend and mentor retire… causing me to feel more than a little unmoored. Yesterday was my first day back and it was supremely weird not to be talking to him throughout the day. The next few months are likely to bring even more changes, and I am not sure how I am going to feel about any of them. I know I am being somewhat vague here, but suffice to say it was a very bad year. If there was a game that I was looking forward to more than probably any… it was New World. I had been involved in testing the game for a long time and devoted countless hours to the title. In fact if steam is at all correct… I have put in over 600 hours not counting any time spent testing. I’ve never seen a game with so much promise… consistently make the worst possible decision when confronted with a challenge. I think patch 1.1 is going to go down in history as quite possibly the worst MMORPG patch I have ever seen play out. It more or less killed the game for me and I think many other players. I held on to see how things shook out with server mergers, but right now after seven servers were merged into one… Frislandia sits around 1200 players during prime time… which ironically is what Minda had when players were first beginning to call it “dead”. The player numbers seem to have stabilized with Europe making up the lions share of its peak 102,000 daily players. This however is a far cry from the over 900,000 peak players at launch. I still think there is a good game here, but it needs so much work and a better understanding of what the players that left actually wanted. This is still a pretty fresh wound so I am not sure how much I can really talk about it today. Last month we lost her due to complications of diabetes. The average for a cat after being diagnosed with diabetes is about three additional years and we got a little over four. I feel like I should probably count myself lucky for that extra years time, but it certain doesn’t feel lucky right now. Mostly it just feels painful to think about my baby girl being gone. She was my partner in crime and pretty much at my side at all times during the day. I miss her every single day. Unless you are willfully ignorant… you will know that this has been a bad year for anyone who follows Blizzard games. The year has been a slow motion parade of grossness as we continue to learn new things about rampant harassment and generally bad policies and working conditions. For me personally… I have distanced myself from anything Blizzard or Activision during this time. While I was not actively playing World of Warcraft for other reasons… namely just how bad Shadowlands felt… I was playing Diablo 3 pretty much every month. My friend Grace and I had this tradition of rolling new characters each time a season started and that is now completely gone. Neither of us can bring ourselves to keep playing these games. It is this awful Catch 22 as well… because the only way change is going to happen is if the corporate overlords start to feel pain monetarily. However this is going to actively harm all of the good folks that I am friends with who are currently working there. So while I support the Better ABK initiative… I just can’t do Blizzard products anymore and not until the simple demands of this initiative have been met and it seems as though change is actually happening. If I woke up tomorrow and found out that Bobby Kotick had been removed from any role in the company… I think that might be the line in the sand required to get me to back down off this point. I will say I miss the hell out of Diablo though, and nothing has managed to scratch that itch.

Denouement

Well that is my list. I think for the most part I covered everything that made a significant impact on me this calendar year. I would love to hear some of your own highs and lows. Drop me a line below and even if I don’t reply quickly, know that I always read the comments. The post Highs and Lows of 2021 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Last night I had an interesting dream and since I am presently in vacation mode… and doing a pretty poor job of actually daily blogging I thought I would talk about it a bit. In the dream my wife and I were roaming around and drove past this massive line of people waiting to get into a building. I stopped to try and figure out what was going on, and someone said it was a “book sale” which piqued my wife’s interests. We stood in the long line and as we were getting close to the front we noticed that all of the products on the store were covered in wrapping to where you couldn’t tell what any one product actually was. Everything in the store was extremely cheap, but the one rule is that you had no idea exactly what you were buying. So for example in the book section it would be a book securely wrapped that said something like “Sci-Fi Book” and then a very vague synopsis of what the book was about. They a pretty wide variety of things that were not books as well. So you might find a box that said “Computer Monitor” and it listed some general specifications of the monitor like that it was capable of 1080p or 1440p. However the books were like a dollar or cheaper and the electronics were like $50 for one of those monitors.

The staff scurried around the tables constantly restocking items as it slowly trickled out of what had to be a massive stock of things. The end result was that it did not feel like those who were late getting there were at a significant disadvantage to those who got there first. We loaded up a cart of things that we were willing to take a gamble on and made our way to the checkout. It turns out one of the people who I went to High School was working the register and she filled in some other details about the store. It seems like every time they held one of these events they sold out completely, and that a lot of the things were assorted factory overstock that would not sell normally, but because of the cheap price and the mystery box conceit that it all went every single time. It was around this time that I woke up and told my wife about the dream. She immediately grasped the concept and I think a lot of the visuals were drawn from my own experiences going to one of these big sales. Half priced books is a chain that you may or may not have near you, and the store itself is phenomenal. However once or twice a year they rent out a convention center and have a big “everything must go” sale where they haul out box after box of things that were not moving in the stores for some reason. The above image is from one of these sales in Arlington Texas, and while we personally did not buy much I could absolutely see the appeal. It does make me wonder how well a mystery box store would do. We seem to have this inherit desire to gamble on getting something really good from an unknown loot box. The assorted subscription box services like Loot Crate seem to still be doing really well for themselves. I know I personally have enjoyed when a store makes up grab bags just because there is some element of surprise to the process. The main difference with the store from my dreams though is that the items they were selling really were more valuable than the price they were selling them for. So often with mystery boxes you technically get more value on paper than what you paid, but it isn’t actually stuff that you would have wanted. Loot Crates seem to have a higher percentage of dollar store kitsch like stickers… than they do actual things that you would have spent money on in the first place.

I know Gamestop does this on the regular for anything that is not selling in their stores, and you can purchase a mystery box filled with toys. Far as I can tell these sell out pretty much every time they offer these. However from the various videos I have watched about them… they really are not worth the time or money spent on trying to get one. This leads me to believe that yes… a Mystery Box store would do exceptionally well. However it also leads me to believe that it would be a horrible value proposition for the actual consumer. The post The Mystery Store appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.