Baud Attitude

Jumping Bayle

Posted on September 17, 2014 by baudattitude

With the end of summer, the Everquest progression guild I’m a member of has revved back up and we’re currently beating our heads against the brick wall that is the “Underfoot” expansion, originally released back in December of 2009 and somewhat notorious for being a monstrous guild-killer of an expansion.

We’re not doing too badly, but it’s definitely a step up from anything we’ve done before.

Underfoot, however, isn’t where I’m spending most of my time. Level-locked progression raids represent three evenings a week, leaving plenty of time to run around Norrath at level 100, and I have been dividing my time before I inevitably burn out again between stomping old content and exploring the very latest stuff, with an eye towards actually seeing most of it BEFORE the next expansion comes out, which will be something of a first.

One particular bit of this had me up until 2 AM (on a work night, no less), which is not normally the sort of thing you want to be doing after you leave your 20s, much less your 30s, but which was so thoroughly satisfying that I feel very little guilt about the whole thing.

This most recent expansion has revolved around the Everquest and Everquest 2 universes, which exist generally as parallel universes, merging due to some sort of giant cosmic rift thing, with the role of the players being to collect four artifacts necessary to close the rift. Naturally, the current owners of these artifacts generally don’t want to relinquish their toys, so a certain amount of hitting them over the head is required.

This leads to Lord Kyle Bayle, a chap with one of these four artifacts, and who REALLY doesn’t want to give it up. It’s a long and seriously unforgiving fight, and I’ve been beating my head against it – along with five other complete strangers, of course – for a good three days now.

To give a short description of the event: You fight four bosses, each of which has some pretty nasty abilities. During these fights, they summon minions both as they lose health AND at predetermined time intervals – so, if you burn them down fast you get overwhelmed by the health-based adds, while taking too long to kill them results in getting stomped by the time-based adds piling up.

Fun!

Even this wouldn’t be too bad, except for one particular boss who summons adds of two different types, with one type having the ability to stun up to four random characters for a solid 18 seconds, taking a six-person EQ group down to two people.

This is rough, but survivable. It means that anyone who is NOT stunned suddenly needs to learn how to use all of those abilities that you get but don’t need to worry about because, honestly, how often is a DPS class going to really NEED to keep a tank alive using your pathetic heals, or tank themselves?

Even this is big fun and really rewards knowing the ins-and-outs of your character class.

What gets a little trickier is when you get a health-based add AND a time-based add at the same time, both of which have this ability, and suddenly most of the group is unable to move, heal, fight, defend themselves, and so on and so forth. NPCs won’t attack a PC in this state, which isn’t much comfort because anyone who managed not to get stunned is suddenly the sole focus of the boss AND both adds and, well, things go poorly all around.

Most of the first several times we tried this fight, this is as far as we got.

The first time we got past it, we weren’t ready for the NEXT boss and he ripped us apart while we were still in a state of shock from having actually gotten past the nasty bit.

The next couple of times, we got past the nasty bit and just kept getting further and further before something went just a little bit wrong with predictable results.

The next-to-last time, and this was the attempt that STARTED after I should have been in bed for a half hour, resulted in us getting so close to the end as to be able to taste victory.

And then we died.

And nobody wanted to give up.

So we tried again, and absolutely stomped it, without a single player death.

And THEN I crashed, and still somehow managed to get up at six in the morning to get ready for work, and I really should be ashamed of myself, as a grown man, letting myself get this sucked into a videogame…

…and I probably will be, once I’ve had some time to properly put it in perspective.

But, today at least, I feel awfully good about myself.

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For sale: Crowbar, used only once.

Posted on September 16, 2014 by baudattitude

While my wife and I are both pretty avid gamers, we don’t have a lot of similar tastes. We can both get thoroughly hooked on MMOs for months at a time, but rarely the same ones – I go back and forth between Everquest and TERA, with occasional side jaunts into questionable free-to-play Korean PvP-focused grindfests, while she has a long-standing LoTRO habit and the occasional fling with Ragnarok Online 2.

We agreed on EQ2 and Rift, to be fair, and we both quite liked DAoC. So, come to think of it, we’ve probably agreed on MMOs more than we’ve disagreed.

But setting that aside, she doesn’t play a lot of the manshooty games, or many rhythm games, or mahjong or 3rd-person adventure types, and I don’t play many match-3s or adventure games.

But, we have recently found common ground – and a new tradition for Saturday afternoons together on the couch – in the HOPA (“Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure”) genre, which are basically digital popcorn. They combine your traditional adventure gamey traits, like picking up random objects off the ground and touching them to everything else you find in hopes that they will interact, with logic puzzles and hidden object scenes, where you stare at piles of random junk and try to find the SPECIFIC random junk that the game is asking you to find.

Oh, and to explain the title, you tend to use each inventory object exactly once and then throw it away, which is particularly funny if you pick up, say, three separate crowbars or crowbar-equivalent tools over the course of a single game with each only being useful in one very specific location for one very specific purpose.

While Steam (praise the GabeN!) has recently started dabbling in offering more of these for sale, the Big Name in the HOPA business is Big Fish Games, a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year pumping out games that fly under the radar – or beneath the notice, if I’m being more judgmental – of the “gaming industry” as represented by Ye Auld AAA publishers and the press which republishes their press releases as news articles.

There may have been a little editorial content in that last sentence. I am allowed to be snarky.

Anyway, when I say “digital popcorn”, I mean that these things are generally inexpensive, can be consumed in a single sitting (7 hours is a very long HOPA), and make you want another one not long after finishing. They also tend to keep their content at a G or PG level, though that doesn’t mean that they don’t have some seriously creepy stories from time to time.

It’s also fun to play these things because, let’s be honest, they make you feel smarter. Solving puzzles is fun, and staring at a shelf covered with macabre knickknacks trying to figure out whether the “bow” the game is asking you to find is a hair bow, an archery bow, or a violin bow, or whether it’s a completely different type of bow you’ve never heard of makes for a great feeling of accomplishment when you realize that it’s the violin bow and it’s peeking out from behind the glass jar of eyeballs.

It should also be noted that these things get a little weird from time to time. Just putting that right out there.

They also tend to be really pretty, even when they trend towards the dark. Some of these have a lot of lovingly-hand-drawn rotting corpses.

Anyway, these are great games to play as a couple because there are certain kinds of puzzles that I’m pretty good at, and certain kinds of puzzles that my wife is crazy good at, and we both enjoy trying to figure out where stuff is in the hidden object bits, and it’s a great way to spend an afternoon…

…especially when, as in the case of “Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart”, they’re on Steam and I can use them to pump up my cheevo count.

There’s two more in that series, but we elected to play through the Lovecraft-themed “Haunted Hotel: Charles Dexter Ward” after the first one and we have something about a haunted carnival on the plate for this Saturday.

The only exception to the general enjoyability of the genre so far has been the Wii version of Mystery Case Files: Musgrave Manor, which was honestly kind of a pain due to the Wii’s low resolution. Hidden object scenes in 480P are not great, to put it gently, and we had to resort to in-game hints far more often than either of us liked.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

ALL the tiles

Posted on September 4, 2014 by baudattitude

Even though I dropped AT&T like a hot rock a few months ago, I still have a phone with AT&T baseband and am thus beholden to their rather pokey release schedule.

So, while the rest of the world has been cheerfully running Windows phone 8.1 for MONTHS now, I’ve been staring mournfully at two miserable rows of tiles wondering what I’d done wrong.

I was starting to quite lose faith, if I’m honest.

Today, therefore, it came as quite a shock to actually get an update notification. 30 minutes of staring at progress bars later, my start screen now looks like this beauty:

And life is good.

Posted in gadgets, Windows Phone, windowsphone | 1 Comment

Deathsmiles

Posted on August 26, 2014 by baudattitude

Well, a couple of days after that last post, I wrapped up Deathsmiles. I never quite managed to 1cc it, which is a little embarrassing, but my best run consisted of me getting to the very last level without taking a single hit, derping, and losing two lives in roughly 10 seconds to enemies that I’d never had any trouble dodging before. I finished that run with only one continue, so I’m just going to call it good. I played through enough times to see all 10 (!) endings and wound up with about 700 of 1000 gamerscore. Considering my past record with bullet-hell shooters, I’m pretty happy.

I have Deathsmiles IIDX sitting on the shelf, and I’m tempted to dive right in to it, but on the other hand I have an awful lot of Suda51 games still and I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything he’s put his mark on.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Special Edition Swag

Posted on August 15, 2014 by baudattitude

I needed to fill a couple of hours before bed last night, but didn’t want to jump into any game where I might still be stuck in the tutorial when I needed to wind it down for the evening.

It turned out that “Deathsmiles”, Cave’s goth-loli-themed bullet-hell shooter from a few years back, was just what I needed. If you don’t mind hitting the continue button when you die, you can blow through it in 45 minutes or less, which means that I actually played through all four main characters’ stories and will go back tonight to play through them a second time to see their other endings. I may even try to 1cc it, because I felt like I was actually getting better on each run.

I did find a little bit of shame on what was in the big Special Edition box along with the game, because, well, it’s a replacement Xbox360 faceplate, covered in cute anime-style girls, that only fits an old-style 360. This thing is probably the least-useful swag I’ve gotten in an SE ever, and I pray that I didn’t include it in my purchasing decision back in 2010, because that would just be embarrassing.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

National Pride

Posted on August 14, 2014 by baudattitude

So, it doesn’t take very much anime and manga to realize that your average Perfectly Ordinary Japanese Schoolgirl is, honestly, a force to be reckoned with. As a class, they live one dimensional portal or talking cat away from being forced to take up arms, put on some high heels, and start fighting demons, overthrowing kingdoms, defending the universe from aliens or just generally kicking arse.

They’re the world’s equivalent of special forces, with frilly skirts.

Silent Hill 3, then, represents the western world’s best response, despite being a Japanese game.

Heather Mason is 100% not Japanese. You could not get a less Japanese person. And, while technically maybe a little old to be called a schoolgirl – she’s 17 – she could maybe still be a senior in high school so I’m going to say that she counts.

Within minutes of starting Silent Hill 3, Heather finds a pistol – and not a girly pistol, a Beretta 92FS, made popular throughout the world by Mel Gibson’s characters in the Lethal Weapon movies – and uses it to put six bullets into a nearby monster. Over the next few hours, ignoring the whole bouncing back-and-forth-between-hell-dimensions thing, she puts together an arsenal of the aforementioned pistol, a shotgun, a submachine gun that looks rather like an Uzi but which IMFDB assures me is a Mac 10, a katana, a 2-handed mace thingy, a switchblade, and – for good measure – a three-foot length of steel pipe, all of which she uses to brutal effect as she slaughters her way through hordes of bizarre flesh-eating monsters on her way to kill a god. And she doesn’t even need to put on high heels in the process.

There is a skirt. It’s not frilly, though.

Now, her dad DID have some inkling that Heather MIGHT have some rough times in life, so it’s possible that he, you know, took her to the range a couple of times as a kid or something.

But, still, as the toughest ever fictional representation of a Perfectly Ordinary American Schoolgirl, I think we should take some pride in being able to call her our own.

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Pies, ranked:

Posted on August 14, 2014 by baudattitude

Any serious discussion of pies must first acknowledge the issue which is presented by restaurant-specific and/or regional pies. For example, Shari’s serves a “Caramel Pecan Crunch” pie, unique in that it is the only pie to date where my wife and I have found common ground, and Sweet Potato Pie, which should by all rights appear high on this list, is rare outside the American south.

With those caveats, the list:

1) Pumpkin (October – December) / Coconut Cream (Jan-Sep)
2) as 1) but reversed
3) Banana Cream
4) Pecan
5) Apple

Finally, while allowances can be made for most lesser pies, at least as long as you can cover them in vanilla ice cream, it is questionable whether even the most forgiving soul could find a place in their heart – or on their plate – for Rhubarb.

I feel this very strongly.

Posted in food | 1 Comment

It’s a good time to be a nerd

Posted on August 12, 2014 by baudattitude

So, went to see Guardians of the Galaxy last weekend, caught Captain America 2 in the cheap theater as my wife hadn’t seen it, and did a marathon session of Agents of Shield to round out the week, so I am officially caught up on the MCU and ready for more Shield or Avengers 2, whichever one happens first.

As a DC fan, it depresses me a little bit that they seem to have no idea what to do with their characters. I find that I walk into any recent Marvel studios movie with the mindset of “how awesome will this one be?” whereas my reaction to DC announcements is pretty much dread.

Still, pretty good time to be a nerd.

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There may be something wrong with me

Posted on August 11, 2014 by baudattitude

There are a few places in video games that I’ve seen enough times that they’ve become familiar places to me. Most of them are in MMOs, of course, since you tend to run through the same bit of scenery enough times that it sinks in. When I was playing EQ2, there were even a good number of places that were close enough to EQ1 to evoke that feeling of comfort that came from knowing the originals.

Outside of MMOs, the best example I can think of for this was starting Ultima V and realizing that the world was still generally the same world as in Ultima IV, even though it had changed in each of the three games prior.

And now I have a new example, because playing Silent Hill 3 shortly after playing Silent Hill 2 meant that I got to run through Brookhaven Hospital again – and, even with the blood dripping down the walls and the tortured screams of the dying and the killer nurses, I still got a comforting sense of being somewhere familiar.

Like I said, there may be something wrong with me.

I won’t say much about the game proper – it’s held in very high regard by fans of the horror genre, and I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. I was playing it on Easy combat, which is basically God Mode, and I still felt genuinely threatened most of the time.

It was a new experience playing an entire PS2 title using PCSX2, and it’s something that I will be doing as much as I can in future. The PS2 was a fine system in the days of square tube TVs with scan lines and S-video hookups, but PS2 games kinda look like ass now. Running this in 3x resolution mode made it look like an entirely new game.

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Numbers!

Posted on August 8, 2014 by baudattitude

After finishing Lollipop Chainsaw, I was updating my Backlog Progress page and realized that I was staring at seven years worth of data that was just begging for analysis.

So I analysized, and I will just say that I am going to defend that particular abomination of a word to the bitter end.

It turns out that I’ve finished – which generally means “getting to the end credits of story mode” or “playing through every character’s story mode”, if the individual stories are very short – two-hundred-and-fifty games in the last seven years, which would be awesome if I wasn’t sitting on a five-hundred game backlog.

Granted, a substantial portion of that backlog is the result of buying game bundles, but even if we take that into account it’s pretty obvious that I’m overreaching myself just a tad.

But let’s set that aside, because numbers!

Unsurprisingly, I got the most games played during my first couple years of college. I was attending classes part-time in 2007 and managed to clock 36 games, which increased to 48 and then 57 games during my first full two years. Junior year? Down from 57 to 29, and it just gets lower from there. Last year I only played through 17 games.

Year-to-date I’m at 14, which puts me on a pace for the low 20s. Not too bad for having a real job and bills to pay and such. It’d be higher if I could stay off the MMOs.

75 of those 250 games were played on PC and 51 on various flavors of mobile device. There are some weird trends in the systems I’ve been playing – for example, I played through 16 Nintendo DS games between 2007 and 2009 and haven’t played a single one since – my DS has literally been a kanji dictionary and nothing else for the last five years. The PSP has gotten a little more consistent love, but it got completely ignored during 2012 and 2013 in favor of iOS games and a newly-purchased Vita.

After the PC, the Xbox 360 and original Xbox have gotten most of the love, with 36 Xbox 360 titles and 18 original Xbox titles. It shows when I look at the shelf – I have a few that I haven’t played yet, but mostly import titles and stuff that I’m hesitant to start because I know it’s going to take ages.

The PS3 has been getting about two games a year, generally an Assassin’s Creed game and one other. It had a spike (six games!) back in 2009 but that was the year I was apparently doing nothing but playing video games 24/7.

I haven’t touched the PS2 much other than to play mascot-based games, Ratchet and Clank for the most part.

The Wii and GameCube were my least-played consoles and honestly it’s a bit embarrassing to think of all the money I’ve sunk into them to play a handful of games. I’ve played nearly as many Saturn games in the last seven years as Wii and GameCube put together.

Genre-wise, I play a LOT of 3rd-person actiony games, your Tomb Raiders and Assassin’s Creeds and such, and a ton of FPS titles. Those two genres make up a good 40% of what I’ve played and rather put the lie to any claims of video game hipsterism I might try to get away with.

After that, I seem to play a bunch of RPGs, about five a year on average. Almost none of those are traditional turn-based affairs – I simply don’t have the patience any more. I also seem to be a bit of a sucker for puzzle games, at about three a year.

Between those and the single-digit genres, I’ve got 2D shooters (13), Mahjong (12) and Rhythm games (11). That last is three Ouendan / EBA games, four Miku-centric games, and a few entries from the plastic-instruments category.

What I was most surprised by was the genres that didn’t even break 10 games. I mean, I will swear up and down that I love me some horror games and some tower defense games, but the actual numbers say that I’ve only played 7 and 4, respectively, since I started keeping track. Likewise, I feel a bit of fanboy shame at only having played through three visual novels.

It’s no real surprise that there aren’t any sports games on the list, unless you’re going to count Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2. (I filed it under “Mini-game collections” as the least offensive category it could fit into.) It’s a little more surprising that I haven’t played any fighting games in the last seven years, or at least I haven’t played any to the point where I’d consider them finished. It’s just a genre that I’ve moved away from, I guess.

Finally, despite how often I include some version of “you probably wouldn’t want your mum to see you playing this” in my comments after finishing a game, only about 12% of the games I’ve played fall into this sort of questionable category. I’m less of a terrible person than I thought!

Conclusions? Well, when I buy a game, I should probably focus on actiony sorts of things, because they’ll get played. I may secretly WANT to play cerebral indie darlings but they just don’t have a track record. Also I appear to have quite the soft spot for the Xbox 360 controller.

And, yeah, I should just stop buying Nintendo consoles. Fortunately the WiiU makes THAT particular decision easy enough, at least until Bayo2 comes out to tempt me.

Posted in videogames | 1 Comment