…maybe?
There was a bit of a rambling rant here about what the existence of this item means for us as a species, but I couldn’t make it funny and eventually took it out back and shot it. It was for the better.
Anyway. Pumpkin Pie chapstick is a thing. You can buy it. I’m not sure I’d advise it if you actually have dry lips. Stick to cherry, which works better. If you just like pumpkin pie spice flavor, knock yourself out.
So, let’s get this out of the way: I really really really want to like Overwatch. I love the visual style, the character designs, the overall cheerfulness of the thing.
And, in the last couple of years, I’ve gotten over my issues with multiplayer-only games and had a stunningly good time with both Titanfall and Splatoon.
So, when Blizzard announced a free weekend, I figured I would finally try it out, fall in love, buy the thing and be off to many happy hours running around freezing people as Mei.
It did not work out so well.
It’s a gorgeous game, and the attention to detail that was obviously lavished onto every last tiny detail of the arenas is amazing. Mei is, as expected, both utterly adorable AND the perfect troll character…
…and I played for several hours and lost 19 out of 20 matches. The one match I DID win was in the 3v3 arcade mode and it felt like an utter fluke.
Compared to Titanfall and Splatoon… those are certainly games where I lost matches, but never to such a degree. Usually my being awful was balanced out by bad players on the other team as well, so I’d at least get the occasional thrill of victory.
It’s pretty obvious that I am just getting into this one too far behind the curve. I could play single player against bots, I guess, and I could level up and get loot boxes that way, but it seems kind of silly to chase cosmetic items for a game I won’t ever be able to play as intended.
So that one goes onto my list of biggest disappointments. Maybe some day Blizzard will make a single player game in the same universe. I’d quite like to see that.
That’s a bit of a misleading title, because this isn’t really a primer.
A few days ago, I talked a friend into trying Bloodborne, and watching him play through the opening bits made me want to play them again. I was having a tough time justifying this, but then I decided to actually record them and post them, with annotations, in a way that will hopefully help anyone new to the title get over the first “hump”, which is playing the game up to the point where you can spend blood echoes to boost your stats and gain levels.
So, I started the game, made a character, got killed by the werewolf in the clinic and got sent to the Hunter’s Dream, picked up some weapons (axe, pistol) and then went back to Yharnam for another pass. I did not return to the Hunter’s Dream at any point (though I dearly could have used some more pebbles) and I deliberately didn’t explore much. There are a bunch of secrets just in this opening bit that I didn’t want to spoil.
It would have been much cooler if I’d done it without dying. I left that bit in just because I was zipping along and just feeling altogether too smug about myself and then I pulled a ton of roamers and ate pavement.
I made liberal use of annotations during these videos, which apparently don’t work on mobile. Best viewed on your home PC, then.
So, without further ado:
Part 1, in which I die at the end:
Part 2, the Yharnam Streets take two:
Part 3, Courtyard and Werewolves:
Part 4, fighting the Cleric Beast. I’m really not proud of this video, I used so many blood vials during the fight.
So, with the exception of some truly awful footwork during the boss fight, I’m pretty happy with these as a “how to get started”. Now that it’s a $20 budget title, I expect a lot of folks will get to try it for the first time, and I envy those people.
Look, Peach, you know I’m always coming home to you but sometimes a man just has to have his Nep-Nep time, you know what I mean?
I’m not the world’s biggest Mario fan but this may have been the single costume that got the best reaction at work. I work with a ton of late-30s-early-40somethings and this tapped right into their nostalgia veins.
Then, when I got home from work, I got out of the car just as a little girl in a Mario outfit was walking down the street. I got a “Mom, look, it’s the real Mario!” which melted even my icy heart.
One of my many hobbies is giving people bad life advice.
Fortunately my friends and family have learned to ignore me.
…OK, still not really, but I did finish one of the big parts of the Legion expansion, the class campaign. This is a fairly long affair, largely because there are some mandatory timesinks in the middle – you need to recruit NPCs and send them off on missions, those missions take a certain number of hours, and you can only have one of the missions active at once – but using Blizzard’s phone application to dispatch missions when you can’t get to your computer does make the whole process a little more efficient, anyway.
Huh, that was one sentence and I should be ashamed of it.
Anyway:
I also hit a gear milestone Sunday evening, pushing my ilvl up to 825 and opening up the first set of “LFR” raids. LFR is Blizzard’s way of making large group raiding content accessible to everyone with patience enough to push a button and wait in a queue, and it’s pretty damn brain-dead stuff. It’s not much more than watching a swarm of locusts devour a corn field that occasionally spits out epic gearz.
I am not good with the metaphors this morning.
Anyway, they pretty much consist of charging forward, nuking everything that looks at you funny, OCCASIONALLY moving so you’re not standing in fire, and looting. The most challenging mechanic I’ve seen is “hey there are TWO things to tank and you need to move them every once in a while or die”, which is not a high bar to step over.
If you do manage to wipe somehow, the entire raid gets a buff so you do more damage / take less damage / do more heals, and this buff improves with every wipe. It really is no-fail raiding, and the rewards are a little less than you’d get from a proper raid, where everyone is on edge and ready to snap at each other for real or imagined shortcomings.
It’s a lot more healthy, though. There’s really no stress and you get to let your derp flag fly.
Anyway, between some upgrades from those, and some upgrades from finishing the campaign and doing some other things, my ilvl hit a whopping 840 last night, so there are 3 or 4 NEW raids for me to LFR and button mash my way through. Those are for tonight.
…and I still need to finish running all the group dungeons from this expansion. They’re way harder than the raids, though, I actually need to pay attention. 🙂
So, I promised everyone a rant about Legion, and now that I’m at level cap, I have one to share.
Let me provide some context first.
I had a friend over on Saturday, and convinced him to give Bloodborne a try. I haven’t played through the intro in a while, so it was really neat to see it again, particularly from the perspective of an observer. It may be one of the best tutorial-without-being-a-tutorial sequences since Super Mario Bros 1-1. You start off with no weapon, something kills you brutally, you get a weapon and the tables are turned, you’re thrown out into a world with almost no direction and the game throws a guy with an axe at you. Beat him, you get to fight TWO guys, and a guy with a shield, and a guy with a weapon and a torch, and a guy ambushing you from the side and then a patrol where you need to pull singles out with “pebbles” the size of softballs… at every step, you are getting a “here is a new problem. Solve it, or die”, and every time you die you get to prove that you understood all of the encounters up to that point again.
Then you hit the two werewolves and really hope you held on to some Molotov cocktails or are good at exploiting geometry, because those sonsabitches are grade A nasty. They do burn good, though.
But, just past THEM, you get to the game’s first boss, the Cleric Beast – and, win or lose, the odds just turned in your favor. Now, you can use blood echoes for leveling up, and throwing them into VIT for hit points gives you a ton of breathing room for experiments and making mistakes. It lets you start the cycle of increasing player power that is core to most games.
To bring this back to WoW, since that’s where I started, this is where the level scaling added for Legion betrays that basic player expectation – that, as your character gains levels, stuff will get easier.
Let’s take Aszuna, the recommended starting zone for the expansion. It has a lot of demons to fight, and they’re not honestly TOO dangerous, at least not as a priest. Most of them are big bags of hit points who say menacing things and fall over after you hit them enough.
I’m in this zone, and I’m level 102, and I have to kill these demons because some guy with weird hair told me that he wants 12 of them dead because they ran over his dog or something, and I can see that they have 800,000 hit points, and that takes an age and a half to chew through but whatever.
Then I get to about the halfway point in level 102, and they now have 960000 hit points, and as boring as they were to kill before they are now 20% more tedious. Gaining experience has actually been punished.
So, since I got to level 110 having only finished the storylines in two of Legion’s four leveling zones, I got to go and play through the other two zones already being 110 and with everything being ridiculously inflated. I needed to go and kill some of those same demons again, and now they had 1.7 million hit points.
The only way to make the content easier is to outgear it, and yes, as I’m getting equipment it IS getting less frustrating. I hit iLvl 825 last night and ran LFR for a couple of raids, got some new gear and then had to go through a dungeon for a quest. I felt like an absolute badass healer the whole way.
But, none of that is because I’m a level 110 priest now. Rather, it’s 100% based on getting shiny epic gear. Really, there was no good reason for a level cap raise, except to make you feel like a newbie again for the nine levels before capping out and gearing up.
It’s cured me of any urge to make alts, I can tell you that. 🙂
tl;dr: level scaling sucks, has always sucked, and will always suck.
I don’t have good luck with PS3s. It’s surprising, because that generation was known for Xbox 360s exploding and PS3s were considered to be fairly stable, but I’ve had the drives go out in both a 60GB launch model and a 120GB slim model.
I’m not even THAT heavy of a gamer.
Anyway. So, back in 2012 I had two unusable PS3s, and I elected to replace the BD-ROM drive in the 60GB model and leave the slim as the system for playing downloaded games only… which means that I’ve been putting a lot of miles on the 60GB and not so many on the slim and I’m starting to worry about whether the 60GB will survive for long enough to finish up the PS3 backlog. It has been crashing a LOT, which made finishing up Mortal Kombat’s story mode a pain in the arse because I would get a victory, the system would try to load a cutscene and crash, and the game wouldn’t have saved the victory so I’d have to fight it all over again.
So, I ordered a replacement drive unit off Amazon from a company called Nextec Direct, and it arrived just as I got sucked back into MMOs. So, it’s been sitting in its mailing envelope for nearly three months now, until I decided that I really needed to get the dang thing installed.
I’ve never taken apart a Slim PS3 before, so I was looking for how-to videos online and getting rather flustered by the number of model variants Sony made. It’s always a little nervewracking getting up to your elbows in a new piece of electronics.
Then, I figured I would take the new drive out of its box and look at it to see if that helped me decide how to go about things, and I was impressed by the fact that Nextec had included a T8 torx driver, and then I noticed a slip of paper UNDER the drive that had a URL for install instructions, and going to that took me through a very simple “what are you doing / what did you buy from us” wizard, and that got me to an almost ridiculously-competent video which walked me through the exact model of PS3 and pointed out all the bits where there were hidden screws and fragile cables and at the end of it I had a fully-functional slim PS3 again.
So, I get a nice sense of self-sufficiency for fixing something, and now I need to get cracking on that backlog again.
I’ve been employed in the tech industry for the better part of the last three decades, so you might imagine that I work with a whole lotta nerds – and, to be fair, I do.
Some of them are kind of on the diet nerd end of the scale, the sorts of folks who fly their nerd flag with their Wal-Mart Captain America T-Shirt, but there are definitely a few alpha nerds around here, and a couple of them know me well enough to know that my boring office drone act is 100% tatamae and 0% honne. I swear, when I decide to finally call it quits with my current employer, I am going to deck my cube out in ponies and maids and watch heads explode. This will presumably be followed by my boss bringing a box over for me.
Anyway, so I was browsing Lifehacker and in a state of temporary toy lust for this thing, just because the notion of a tube amplifier is so delightfully geeky, and I showed it to one of these alphas, whose dismissive response was a half-sneered “It won’t make your Girls’ Generation sound any better.”
I think I rather managed to shock him when I showed him what I actually had on my phone.
At any rate, he wandered off muttering something about it being impossible to troll me. I think that’s one in the W column for me.
(And, no, I didn’t wind up buying a new desktop amplifier.)
Note: This post needs a ton of editing, but I’m going to throw it up so I can look at it later, cringe, and turn it into proper English. If you see this notice, be ye warned.
It probably wasn’t conveyed very well in the last post, but one of my favorite things to mentally catalog are the bumper stickers that people put on their cars. It seems like a pretty uniquely American thing – or at least I’ve never seen it in Japan and didn’t see it in the UK – and it always impresses me how much people choose to convey with a few bits of vinyl.
I will, at this point, set aside the stick-figure families of the world, whichever quirky variant has been chosen, because those are borderline annoying. Likewise, political bumper stickers during election season just kind of fade into the noise. I AM always impressed by someone who’s still displaying a political bumper sticker for the losing side months and years after the election. It’s a beautifully passive-aggressive way to get a point across.
Mind you, if you’re still flying the flag of the WINNING side years later, that has always struck me as a little tacky. But I digress.
What I DO love are the bumper stickers that are designed to be very meaningful to a particular in-group and to be fairly meaningless outside that group, and that’s a fascination that started for me a couple of decades ago when I saw a pair of co-workers bond over an “Easy Does It” sticker – the sort of thing that had always sort of faded into the background noise as a fairly banal saying to stick to the back of your car. When they saw my confusion, they explained that it was an AA sticker, so if you saw it stuck to some guy’s car, you knew that he’d been through the same rough patch you’d been through.
It was an eye opener to be sure. Up until that point, the only symbolism I’d understood was the Ichthys symbol and all of its variants – living in Oregon, which is a fairly liberal state, you see a lot of Darwin fish, and Truth Fish eating Darwin Fish, and FSM-fishes and the like.
So now, when I see a bumper sticker that just doesn’t seem to make sense, I am compelled to try to figure out what it means and who would find it meaningful. It’s a kind of modern-day symbolism, and it’s even more interesting when it’s a group that doesn’t have any particular REASON to be obscure but is using slightly-obfuscated symbols to indicate their membership in the group only to other members of the group.
For example, seeing a HE>i sticker on a car instead of an Ichthys, or a ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ sticker instead of an “I’m the NRA, and I vote!”, when neither of these are particularly controversial views, even in Oregon. We’re 70% Christian and we have a LOT of hunters and target-shooting enthusiasts.
There’s probably a decent thesis paper in there somewhere. I am long since out of college. If you have stumbled across this as a grad student in desperate need of something to write about, feel free to take the idea and run with it.
Likewise, while I’m not terribly fond of tarting up the back of your car with little white Apple logos, I get a kick from any car where the driver has dug up a vintage six-color “Apple Computer” sticker as a way to point out their corporate fandom while setting themselves apart from the iPod crowd.
On the other side of things, I have been somewhat embarrassed by accidentally flying the colors of a subculture and having very confusing conversations as a result, like when I stuck a shoshinsha mark on the back of my car as an “I love Japanese things” sort of message and found out that it had been co-opted by people who were into tuning import cars and I was unintentionally projecting the image that I was, I dunno, into drifting or something. I stick to just a university alumni sticker and a Dutch Brothers logo sticker now, which are fairly hard to misinterpret. 🙂
Baud Attitude 