We Are Already Living in the Future, And You Can Keep Your Flying Cars

Posted on November 25, 2016 by baudattitude

OK, OK, that’s a bit of hyperbole.  I like hyperbole.  Also I stole the post title from threepanelsoul without guilt or shame because I don’t like guilt and don’t know what you meat people mean by “shame”.

Last winter, I played through both Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Origins, with the second of those leading me to a huge epiphany re: Bat-Gaming.  I put a bunch of hours into it, did a lot more optional stuff than I usually do in open-world games, and really wanted to check out the game’s “Cold, Cold Heart” story DLC… but didn’t want to pay 10 bucks for it, since the game itself only cost 5.

So, I fumed a bit, and I waited for the next Steam sale, and the next, and… well, it just never got any cheaper.  It was very frustrating.

Thankfully, I use a site called IsThereAnyDeal, which does exactly what it says on the tin really.  It watches a ton of different sites and emails me when something on my Steam wishlist goes on special offer.

In this case, it sent me an email saying that Cold, Cold Heart had been marked down to $2.50 on Direct2Drive, one of those digital distribution sites I am embarrassed to admit that I’d kind of forgotten existed.  Back in the days when Steam only posted a single deal a week, I used to occasionally buy games from them, but I hadn’t visited their site in probably five years.  Still, my old account still worked and they promised to sell me a Steam key, and then I got to checkout and there was an option for Apple Pay.

…Apple Pay?  From a website?  Oh, right, there was something about that in the macOS Sierra introduction thing I hadn’t really watched all that closely, I wonder how it works?

It turns out that how it works is you say “I would like to give you money” and your phone lights up asking for your thumbprint, and you put your thumb on the appropriate spot, and there is a happy chime sound and the website records that you have transferred them currency and here is your Steam key.

And I am old enough that this is damned near to being black magic.  Truly this is the magnificent future.

 

Posted in mac, PC Gaming | 1 Comment

On The Evolution Of Gaming Skill

Posted on November 24, 2016 by baudattitude

First off, I want all the credit for not spelling “Skill” with a Z at the end.  It took some self control.

Carrying on, then.

While I have been playing games since the glory days of the arcade, and an avid purchaser of console games since the Sega Genesis, I was always awful about actually finishing them.  That didn’t change until a friend and I played through Battlefront II back in 2007, but since then I have quite prided myself on a steadily-increasing willingness to try new games and new genres and tackle them with the intent of, you know, actually playing the entire dang game.

One of the earliest games I played after having the “wait, I can BEAT these?” epiphany was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, hereafter CODMEW, which was notable both for being almost immediately played, rather than left in the shrink-wrap, and also because I’m almost certain that it was my first experience of sitting down with a game and not stopping until I saw the end credits.  It’s pretty short, to start, and it rarely slows down outside of loading screens and a couple of scripted bits, making it a good candidate for a one session play-through.

One of the best things about CODMEW, as the inexperienced twin-stick FPS player I was at the time, was a very user-friendly feature baked into its tutorial.  Essentially, you’re given an obstacle course to play through, with a fairly generous time limit, and the game assesses your score at the end and suggests a difficulty.  If you don’t complete the obstacle course within the time limit, it runs you through it again. You can of course run it again yourself if you want to test yourself a bit.

Back when I played through the game for the first time, it suggested “easy”, which I thought was quite fair.

It’s been nearly nine years since then, and CODMEW has always stuck with me as one of the best experiences I’ve had in this hobby, so I naturally bought the spiffed-up shiny remastered version.

Now, keep in mind that I have played a lot of games since then, including some that have a reputation for being rather taxing.  I went into the tutorial, then, with some anticipation that nine more years worth of gaming experience would be reflected at the end of the obstacle course.

Technically, having it suggest “normal” DID represent some improvement.  Right? Right?

…I will just be over here clutching the tattered remnants of my dignity.

(Oh, and I played it start to finish in a single sitting again.  It holds up very well and it’s neat to look at all of the things it did that other shooters have since borrowed.)

 

 

Posted in PS4, videogames | Leave a comment

Have We Gone Too Far?

Posted on November 22, 2016 by baudattitude

piestick

…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.

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I’m not meant to play Overwatch

Posted on November 19, 2016 by baudattitude

overwatchlogo

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.

Posted in PC Gaming | 2 Comments

A Bloodborne Primer

Posted on October 31, 2016 by baudattitude

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.

 

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Busted

Posted on October 31, 2016 by baudattitude

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?

mariovita

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.

 

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Hobbies

Posted on October 27, 2016 by baudattitude

One of my many hobbies is giving people bad life advice.

badadvice

Fortunately my friends and family have learned to ignore me.

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OK, NOW I Beat WoW

Posted on October 26, 2016 by baudattitude

…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:

wowcampaign

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.

wowdarkbough

wowtormentedguardians

wowriftofaln

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. 🙂

 

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On Level Scaling. 

Posted on October 24, 2016 by baudattitude

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. 

Posted in Souls, videogames | 2 Comments

I’ve Mended Something, Redux

Posted on October 22, 2016 by baudattitude

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.

 

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