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Heading Back to Trove

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I’m back to playing Trove again this week. Sometimes I want a game I can turn my brain off and play and feel like I’m getting somewhere. It fills the same role as Diablo 3 for me, grind a few levels get some new gear while listening to music or something. I also have a group of friends who get together to run the weekly Shadow Towers, which are the closest thing Trove has to challenging content.

Lately I’ve been looking for a game I can play with no sound so I can catch up on some podcasts. Trove is perfect for this as I don’t have the game sounds on anyways because they’re a little repetitive. I think the entire soundtrack consists of 3 songs.

This week I took a break from my main class the Ice Sage and have been playing the Pirate Captain. I’ve had him for a long time and I don’t know why I haven’t played him before. He’s got a really great set of skills with parrot manned turrets, explosive decoys, and a giant cannon the fires molten cannon balls. In my adventures so far I’ve leveled him up past the 5k Power Rank needed to do higher level content with my friends. Also I got a class gem that lets me spawn 2 Parrot Turrets instead of just one. And we al know more turrents are always better.

Trove hasn’t had the sticking factor that it once had for me. Jay has been playing it every day for the last year and a half and I can’t seem to get into it for more than a month or 2 at a time. I used to really like unlocking and playing around with all the classes. When the game first launched there were new classes almost every month. As of late the class releases have slowed dramtically with the last one being released in August of last year.

Trove has been really slow with content updates as well. While there have been some major patches since the release of Mantle of Power, which came out last summer, none of them have added new features to the game and have seemed to just added more stuff to the store. In fact there was one “major update” that was just an improvement to the store UI. Apparently they’ll be adding sub-classes and a few more shadow tower bosses later this year but a release date hasn’t been mentioned yet.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be playing Trove this time around. I could be a few weeks or it could be a few months but right now I’m enjoying my time there.

 

Gaming Choice Paralysis

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Last week I built my first gaming PC. With that came a crash course in computer hardware installation and a great sense of accomplishment but also some unforeseen consequences. It ran for about 3 days until the power supply gave out causing a whole week worth of troubleshooting, researching, and more troubleshooting. But after all was said and done I was able to bring it back to life over the weekend!

For the past 8 years or so I’ve been attempting to play games on a business laptop. It wasn’t exactly an enjoyable experience. There were only a few kinds of games I could pay, Namely this came down to do I want to play a 2d side scroller, a pixelated indie game, or, if I was lucky, a game that came out 15 years ago. Other than that my choice in games has been whatever the PS3 and PS4 libraries held. While they aren’t small by any means there was always something I wanted to play but it wasn’t on the system.

Now I have all the options and I must admit it’s a little dizzying how many choices there are. I’ve already installed games I’ve been following for years but could never run well enough to play. Games like Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Black Desert Online, Wildstar, even World of Warcraft. They all run without skipping a beat, it’s fantastic.

Then there’s single player games I’ve been waiting on like Grim Dawn and Elite Dangerous. Though Elite Dangerous is set to release for PS4 at the end of the month…go figure.

Unfortunately I don’t have any really intensive game to really make my PC work hard but even my old games take on a new life at maximum settings and on a bigger monitor.

With all of these options how do I choose what to play? I find myself hopping from game to game saying “oooo look how pretty this one it” and then moving on to test another. It’s hard to pick just one to play for an hour but I can’t complain too much it’s a pretty good problem to have.

I’m Not Squishy: Back in the Saddle

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Wow, I didn’t realize until I looked at the date on my last post that I had taken a 3 month break. I really didn’t mean to, suddenly it was the end of May! But fear not, I have returned with a vengeance. Alright, maybe not so much a vengeance, that sounds like a bit much.

I did a lot in over these last few months. Me and my friends tried our hands at Twitch streaming and Youtube shenanigans which has been quite fun. I went on a cruise in March which was quite an experience. Blue Skies, warm weather, water everywhere, it was great. Since March, I’ve been working a ton and always meaning to write a post and never quite getting around to it.

On the other hand I finally built myself a fancy PC so now I can play ALL the games. Seriously its a little overwhelming the amount of choice in games that have opened up to me. But that’s fine because there was only one game I’ve been waiting to play and that’s Guild Wars 2. And after sinking more than a few hours into it this weekend I have to say it’s been well worth the wait.

 

 

Now, I do have a level 80 character from before the expansion, so I’ve put some significant time into it already but I never felt like I was getting the full experience at 15 fps on the lowest settings. I’d like to say I don’t care about graphics, but who am I kidding I like pretty things. I made a new Sylvari Ranger and a lot has changed in terms of the new player experience since I’ve been gone. It’s like coming home though everything is a little bit familiar but I’ve forgotten enough that it’s not boring doing things over again.

I’m looking forward to finally be able to play some other games I haven’t been able to run like Wildstar, SWOTOR, even the Secret World (maintenance mode has never bothered me before). It’s always been a little weird for me following the news and development of the genre without actually being able to play the majority of the games I was interested in.

I’m really excited to get back into blogging. I’m going to try my best not to disappear for so long again. I think my little hiatus was necessarily but I miss writing so much and now I have something to write about again.

I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and you’ll be hearing from me again real soon.

 

Dragon Quest: The Rail Shooter

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Skipping ahead a few decades  since Super Ghost and Goblins, Jay and I spent the majority of last weekend playing Dragon Quests Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors for the Wii. I still can’t tell if the game had bad writing or just didn’t take itself too seriously. There are some awkward momments in dialogue like the the Armor Shop Lady greeting you as her lover but also some clever momments like characters being able to fin your house because they figure you don’t live in a shop or a church, the only other buildings in the kingdom.
Upon starting the game we got some history of the world. It’s your standard JRPG story of a great evil that took over the world and 3 people were able to defeat him and lock him in a volcano. Now 5 years later the kingdom is enjoying this time of peace.The story starts with our main character turing 16. We played 8 hours of this game and still don’t know what the main characters name is.In order to become a man or something he has to go complete a dungeon to prove his worthiness. This particular dungeon is guarded by Dirk the Knight of Worth who talks to you the whole battle in a charming British accent. Once we defeated him and he deamed us worthy we are allowed to go back to the kingdom.

All the background we get of the main character is his father used to be the best swords man in the kingdom until he lost his sword arm fighting Xiphos that great evil him and 2 other people locked in a volcano. Now dad just goes to the pub and hits on women. So after the MC goes to the cave to prove his worth he returns home to find the plot. The queen has disappeared and her son the prince is concerned because the last few weeks she’s taken up wearing a mask around. I would hope that if I took up wearing a mask around someone would at least tell me it was a little weird.

So we take the prince to go look for his mom who is wandering around the woods looking for a healing hot spring. Instead of finding the queen we find a random french girl living in the woods who saw the queen. She’s convinced she has seen the mask before as a child and remembered it being frightening and apparently this is important. I mean the mask is kind of creepy so I wouldn’t be surprised if a little kid was scared of it. So we take her back to the kingdom where we learn she used to be a nun and do absolutely nothing with this information. Later the towns people are freaking out beacuase a monster has been seen near the beach. Naturally they asked the One Handed swordsman father to do it and he agrees. But dad’s been drinking a bit too much and asks the main character to come along.

So here I am thinking ok this mission should be easy, Dad should be super overpowered even with one arm, he did help imprison the greates tevil the world has ever seen. But it turns out when dad switched classes from fighter to Mage he started back at level one and now we have a level 11 mage who only knows Kaboom…but thats ok because it pretty much one shots everything when he uses it. Me and Dad kill the scary fish man at the beach and return to the castle to find the Queen has gone into the Tower of Mirrors. Naturally the main character follows her in there and at the top of the tower the group confronts the queen. Someone finally does someting sensible and remoes the mask from the queen via sword to the face which shatters the mask. Unfortuanelty it turns out the mask was the only thing keeping Xiphos imprisoned in his volcano and now he’s free to destroy the world again DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUN. And this is where we ran out of time and stopped playing, quite a cliff hanger.

The games main shtick is using the Wii-mote as a sword to fight the packs of monsters you run into. That works out better than I thought it would. The game kind of plays like a rail shooter except you can choose when you want to move forward.There isn’t a lot of free roaming in the outside world but you can click on some objects and get loot. There’s only one direction to go and that’s forward. Every once and a while your given the option to go left or right where one path leads to the next part of the dungeon and the other usually leads to a treasure chest.

The fighting actually works pretty well, it’s kind of like fruit ninja with a Wii-mote. Some packs of monsters move around making them harder to hit while others actually attack you which you have to block with your shield. Some projectiles can be hit back and helpful colored dots appear on the screen to assit you in feeling awesome about deflecting a fireball back at its creator. As your going about slaying slimes and such there is a gage that also fills up that lets you use a super move that usually kills everything in sight.

The boss battles are especially fun as they combine all the mechanics you’ve learned so far. While most of the game is pretty easy, the boss battles can actually be a bit challanging and we actually died a few times.

As a side note the only mini game was this thing, the Tambola. After you spend an arbitrary number of coins at a shop sometimes they give you a Tambola ticket. The game has you click the end of the handle and then spin the wii-mote around as fast as you can and somehow it determines a prize for you. Even after almost throwing my shoulder out trying this out, we never managed to get any result besides 5th prize and fail…But you can bet we tried it every chance we got.

While we didn’t beat the game I think we played the majority of it. Whenever I make it back home again I’m definately looking forward to finishing it.

A Weekend of Older Games

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Every few months I make the trek back to my hometown to visit family and friends. This weekend was one such time. I always try and visit my friend Jay when I go home, we’ve known each other for a long time and always have fun together. Jay happens to collect everything gaming related under the sun so when I go over there we always end up playing some really old games. He’s got games from every system generation and every system to go with it. It’s kind of like a museum over there, complete with a working Panasonic 3DO. This weekend we played Super Ghosts and Goblins and Earthworm Jim on whatever this thing is. It plays a whole slew of cartridges with the only downside being the sound is a little distorted.

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Playing so many retro inspired 2D indie games, I’m always a little surprised how familiar actual retro games are when I get a chance to play them. Most of them are fun to see how far games have come. There is always that moment when you run into some piece of archaic game play or UI but for the most part these older games aren’t as alien or a simplistic as I thought they’d be.

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Super Ghosts and Goblins is one of those games that wold fall into the Metroidvania category. Jay’s convinced that this games name should also be part of the genres name but Metroidvaniagoblins just doesn’t roll off the tongue. There are chests you find throughout each level that contain new weapons and armor. You can only have one weapon and armor equipped at a time so you have to choose if its worth giving up your current ones for new ones. When you get hit you lose your armor, get hit twice and your dead. It’s hard, even on normal difficulty it’s hard but the platforming and the enemies are fair. There’s a life system and once you lose all of them you have to use a continue. This ends up not being that bad as you can give yourself 9 lives for every continue and your given 7 continues…that’s a lot of lives to go through. We ended up playing about an hour of it before we gave up and moved on.

Super Ghost and Goblins felt like a rouge-lite without procedural generated levels. When you die you have to start over but not completely. You keep the last weapon you used and sometimes there are check points. You have to go through the whole level again this time with different armor and weapons dropping from the chests. It’s also just hard enough that I felt like it was a challenge without being unfair.

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The other game we played was Earth Worm Jim which was definable an experience. I’m not sure if there’s some back story in the manual but as far as I can tell I was playing a space worm with arms and a gun. We only played the first level and what a level it was. Being chased down by garbage bats, being attacked by junk dogs, and bouncing on old tires. The level boss was a garbage can that would upper cut me into the stratosphere if I  got too close. It’s one of those games that left me wondering how exactly did someone think this up. Its a game I’d like to return to on my next trip up there but it’s a game I can only play in small doses. It has great art and colors and feels like playing a Saturday morning cartoon. It also reminds me of a random 5 dollar Steam game you buy on sale because it looks ridiculous.

 

 

FFXIV-I Want to Be an Interior Designer

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With the drop of patch 3.4 in Final Fantasy 14 came the addition of apartments and aquariums. Since I still haven’t gotten past the 2.XX content there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot else to be excited by in this patch for the time being. Unfortunately I can’t even do that. While I do have 1 character at 50 I’m nowhere near the Grand Company Rank to be able to purchase an apartment.

Now I understand why this is the way it is. Once again there are a limited amount of these things to go around so might as well make people work to get them so they’re not all gobbled up quickly. To be honest I haven’t ever been that interested in player housing in MMO’s in the past, I guess I just had other things to do. However, I love player housing in single player games, I played a lot of animal crossing as a kid. But it intrigues me now in FFXIV, especially when a lot of craft-able items are pieces of furniture that I previously had no use for. As for aquariums, it gives me even more of an excuse to spend my time fishing, for some reason I love fishing in game. The list of fish that can be placed is kind of small but there’s always room for improvement.

I guess this will give me another thing to work towards while I continue to level my Dragoon to 50. I’m sure it won’t be that bad, I just hope they’re not all gone by the time I can get one. Though from what it sounds like, if I’m reading the patch notes right, there should be plenty to go around.

 

 

 

A Bizarre Weekend with Pokemon Rumble World

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Before I went out of town this weekend I went down to my local library to see what kind of 3DS games they had. What I was really looking for was Fire Emblem: Birthright and for the past couple of weeks every time I visited the library it was there. But of course this time, when I actually wanted to play, it was checked out. Go figure.

So I instead opted for Pokemon Rumble World because it looked sort of interesting. I remember downloading it once out of curiosity, it’s a free to play title on the 3DS complete with micro transactions and mobile-esque timers. But i remember it being kind of fun, a super easy action RPG with Pokemon. Curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what the retail version was like. Ever since Pokemon Mystery Dungeon I’ve enjoyed the Pokemon spin-off games a little more than the main ones. Nevertheless, It was a really strange experience.

Like most mobile games it hooks you in with easy but fun gameplay. Your Pokemon has one or two moves and you go around beating up hordes of other Pokemon. THere are different balloons you can buy which are basically packs of Pokemon and dungeons that you can enter. They either drop some coins or a collectable version of themselves that you can then play as. There’s the same arbitrary power ranking like in Pokemon Go. associated with every Pokemon drop. At the end of the dungeon there’s a boss a bigger more powerful Pokemon that will either drop a lot of coins or a supped up Pokemon. the dungeons take between 2-3 minutes and afterwards the balloon goes on a timer to inflate. Of course you can always bypass that by using the premium currencey. There are also challenges you can do to get some diamonds and of course you can annoy your friends with requests to play to get more diamonds

The game gives you 3,000 Pokediamonds, the premium currency, and a diamond mine that you can use once a day to get 40 diamonds. This is actually pretty good considering it only takes one diamond to inflate a balloon and only a few diamonds for special upgrades like better Pokemon drops and faster Pokemon. At first the game seems kind of predatory. Some of the timers are 4 plus hours with the shortest ones being 20 minutes. But what I found most interesting is that even if you play the free version you can only ever buy 3,000 diamonds or whats included in the retail version. After which the game gives you a diamond mine same as the retail version and you can’t buy any more.

I’ve never heard of a pay cap on a free to play game, you would think that limiting the amount of money you can extract from each user wouldn’t be great for your bottom line. But it is great for the player especially when we are seeing more and more games who rely on the “whales” and the players with less financial self control to turn a profit. I’d like to see more of this kind of business model who knows maybe what’s good for the players can also be good for the companies as well.

It turns out Pokemon Rumble World was good for my 3 hour road trip. It’s a great time waster but the charm wears off after a couple of hours. It turns into the same repetitive, non challenging game play and collect-a-thon. Which is great for scratching a grinding itch if you have one. One thing is for sure, there are a lot of Pokemon. In my short time with the game i managed to collect 191 of them, that still leaves over 500 more to go.

 

September Goals

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This months list of goals is pretty short. September is going to be a very busy month and I know I won’t get in as much gaming time as I’d like to.

FInal Fantasy 14 Goals

Get Dragoon Soul Crystal

Get Monk Soul Crystal

Decide between Playing monk or Dragoon

Complete the 2.XX content and get into Heavensward

Backlog Goals

Defeat the fourth boss in Furi

Get to the next system in No Man’s Sky

Complete Unepic

 

Growing Up Gaming

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This post is in response to this weeks NBI 2016 writing prompt.

 

When my family moved closer to the rest of the extended family, I got to know my cousins better. They were around my age and we liked the same things. We would have sleep overs and watch Pokemon, talk about digimon and play with action figures.

Growing up I never had cable. While other kids were watching Cartoon Network I was watching PBS. So it’s not really a surprise that when Saturday Morning Cartoons were still a thing, I was glued to the TV.

Our Saturday morning cartoons were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-man, Batman, and Power Rangers. I was always looked forward to Pokemon and Digimon the most.

One day they showed me a Gameboy Color with Pokemon Blue. My 7 year old mind was blown.   Not only could I catch whatever Pokemon I wanted, but I could battle them and get gym badges too! I  watched them play these games any chance I got. Never playing a video game before, I was ecstatic when they let me play. We spent a lot of afternoons after school sharing a Gameboy and leveling our horde of Pokemon.

We played Pokemon games for a long time. my cousins got a second Gameboy and Pokemon Red so we didn’t have to share as much. We could finally collect them all. I remember having to connect the Gameboys with a cable to trade and battle. Ialways wondered how the pokeballs fit through that tiny wire.

We eagerly looked forward to the next installment of the series when the Ash set out for the Johto Region on TV. I don’t remember much about Silver or Gold, but I distinctly remember cloning 6 Quilavas and completing the game, good times.

A few years later, they got a Nintendo 64. I took every chance I could get to visit the cousins. We’d spend hours together playing Super Smash Brothers, chasing each other around in Golden Eye, and trying to get all the stars in Super Mario 64.

As we grew up, we grew apart. They grew out of Pokemon (I still haven’t).

Now when the family gets together it’s the younger cousins who want to play the games. They take out the Wii U and school us in Super Smash Bros. They teach us about Minecraft and show us their favorite streamers. We take out the N64 and they make fun of the graphics. But when we all get together we still play games and it’s just as much fun as it was back then.