Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in full force and continuing our adventure through the second part of the Games of the Year 2025 podcast. We cut the list in half, giving us fifteen games that we were talking about in each episode. This is not necessarily a numerical list, but the titles that appear later in the shows did get more votes. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We are down a Thalen this week but continue chipping away at our massive backlog of discussion topics after taking two weeks off due to holiday and illness. We start off with some talk about Dwarven Realms Season 5 and how it allows you to get all the loot without gating your access. From there, we talk about Star Citizen and how it has mostly kept all of its promises during the 2025 release schedule. Most of us have been playing Guild Wars Reforged, and we talk a bit about how much better the game looks and what we are playing. Grace discusses a Vampire Survivors like that has building sim functionality in the very long-named Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road. Bel has ventured forth into the realm of FDM printing and talks about various lessons learned. Lastly, a quick topic as Bel shares that the POE2 bear is really good, but so is the recently shadow-dropped Paladin in Diablo 4.
Good Morning Folks. My wreath was perfect… until it wasn’t. Around 3:30 yesterday afternoon I had to run into the office for a moment, and when I left the house the wreath looked beautiful. When I got back around 5:30 it looked like the image on the right side. Essentially there is a short period of time where the light streams through our glass storm door at exactly the right angle that it heats up the metal of our door handle. This is not something I had really thought about before now, but apparently it also heats up the door frame area enough for the PLA that I printed the wreath out of to warp beyond all recognition. At first I thought it was a mechanical failure in one of the joints that could be fixed, but upon further inspection it is like the thing just sort of stretched and warped uncontrollably. For now I have a deeply surrealist wreath, and I am kind of curious what it does over multiple days… but for future knowledge I guess I probably need to print the frame out of ABS which is way more heat resistant. It was a massive bummer, but at least it looked cool long enough to take a photo of it.
I had an extremely busy day, and when I finally got home legitimately I crashed pretty hard after eating the takeout that I picked up on my way home. I attempted to grind a bit in Path of Exile but by 8:30pm I was falling asleep in my chair, and decided to head to bed. I tossed and turned quite a bit, and had a rather fitful night where I was either too hot or too cold and could not really seem to regulate my temperatures. I did make it a bit further into my quest for level 100 and am roughly 1 pip away from dinging. In theory if I stay awake long enough tonight… I should be able to push through to level 100, or at least get considerably closer. I am still fighting whatever unnamed death flu nonsense that I picked up. My boss is a few days behind me and is also struggling, even though to the best of my knowledge we did not infect each other. The cough has been the worst part and I just go into these coughing fits where I struggle to recover gracefully. Today is supposed to be the holiday party in the office, but I dropped off the cookies I was bringing last night so that I did not have to be around people, and am otherwise skipping out today because I don’t feel comfortable hacking and coughing nonstop around others.
Tam introduced us to Where Winds Meet last weekend on the podcast and a few of us have tried it out. So far… I am not really vibing with it. He indicated that they had resolved the beard problems that I have with most eastern fantasy games… and I am not entirely certain about that. This was the best beard I could get, which is reasonable, but nowhere near as majestic as I would have liked. Mostly it feels very much like a Ghosts game, and I am not sure when the MMORPG elements come online. For the moment it feels like I am playing an entirely single player adventure game with mildly souls-like roots, and that is find and good…. but I am not entirely certain if I care enough about it to keep playing. If anything I think my time would be better served playing Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, or catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I at a minimum wanted to fire it up and check it out, and it is a gorgeous game… just not sure if it is one that is going to flip the appropriate centers in my brain.
So the other night I got distracted when I was going out into the backyard and feeding tripod, and apparently never actually locked that door. So I slept the entire night with it unlocked, where anyone could have walked into my bedroom. That creeped me out to the point where I had to scrub through my backyard camera just to make sure no one did anything untoward. At which point I found out that I have a bunch of Raccoons who have apparently been climbing the pole up to the second floor deck off my wife’s office. I have no clue what they are doing. There is nowhere into the house up there, and no access to any crawl spaces or anything… but it seems like they are just having fun climbing around. They were specifically doing it when the wind-chimes were going crazy so I wonder if they were going up to investigate that. I figured if nothing else you could see cute Raccoons doing Raccoon things.
I am bummed about the wreath, but it is what it is. This is all learning experiences as I shuffle forward into my first attempts at 3D printing.
The post Thermal Failure appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Bel was partially dead, and then holiday travel happened, and as a result, we ended up taking a few weeks off without really intending to. We are back and hopefully for more than a few weeks, but given another holiday is looming, who knows? This week we talk about how all of the various ARPGs out there seem to have a contingency of aggro fans, and discuss the reasons why, but also why we are not quite as doomer on them. Bel talks a bit about the release of the Druid and the Vaal league coming up in Path of Exile II. Tam discusses a new Chinese MMORPG called Where Winds Meet, which seems to push Gacha elements aside and produce a really wild experience. From there Grace discusses a Raid Healing Simulator if the form of Wild Growth, and Kodra, an alternate universe Donkey Kong Country in the form of Windswept. We have a revisiting of a topic we have discussed more than once, about why PVPVE fails… this time, how it ruins the otherwise joyful experience of Arc Raiders. We wrap the show up with some rapid-fire topics about various books and media we have been consuming.