Names are Hard. I’ve been playing a series of Tabletop games, and it’s pretty much always the hardest part. My general online handle, HiddenWings, came about shortly after high school. It’s taken directly from a song title posted to an online music site that I’m surprised to see still exists. (When I found it, there was literally no artist name posted.) I’ve been using it since 2007 on forums, and since 2008 in games on PSN and Steam. It’s become my go-to default username ever since.
Even less creative is my go-to character name. Ashgar was a character in the GBA game Magi-Nation, and also a card in the related TCG (which I knew very little about at the time). In the game, Ashgar is the not-very-bright elder of Cald, the fire region. He does have in his possession a key that opens almost every door in the entire game; you have to steal it as part of the plot. (As a side note, there are severe penalties for not returning it before a certain point when he notices it’s missing.) The idea that “Ashgar’s Key” could open everything was fascinating to me, and so I remembered the name. It became the name of my horde-side druid in the summer of 2007, and since that was my first character to see serious play, the name stuck. When I transferred to Argent Dawn the name was taken, and so the name Ashfang came about.
Other names come from other places. When I need a full name (especially for a human), I tend to look up name meanings and pick something that has the right feeling, even if these names have completely different origins, or would be unlikely to occur together due to being popular in different parts of the world. Zane Dimetrius is from a variation on my actual name, and a surname meaning “Earth-lover”, an appropriate name for the earth mage that the name represented. Another example is Trevor Lowell, a name for a werewolf of sorts from nowhere special. This one’s a bit of a joke, as the names mean “big town” and “little wolf”. I liked that one enough that it became the name of my TSW character. As I play more things my stable of names slowly expands, but I’ll probably keep using a lot of the same ones whenever I can make similar characters.
John Watson, one of the developers of The Banner Saga, had this to say about iOS pricing:
Apple is frustrated, along with everybody else, about the mentality that’s gone rampant in mobile app markets, where people don’t want to pay anything… They want to pay as little as possible. They think that four dollars is an exorbitant amount to pay for a game, which is very illogical considering most people’s lifestyles. They’ll spend $600 on an iPad, and $4 on a coffee, drop $20 on lunch, but when it comes to spending four or five dollars on a game, it’s this life-altering decision. I’m frustrated with that too.
Personally, I understand where he’s coming from, and I’m not even a game developer. It’s absurd to me that people call out things like Monument Valley at $4 as “expensive”. Taking it up a bit, we have Chrono Trigger at $10. Chrono Trigger is generally considered to be one of the best RPGs ever, and I’m personally glad that Square keeps re-releasing it for people to play that missed it the first time around (or the second or third at this point). Currently, the ways you can play chrono trigger are in a super nintendo, assuming you still have one. this’ll run you over $100 now, and it would have been about $80 then, not adjusted for inflation. It’s on the Wii’s Virtual Console for $8. The next version was for the Playstation, and that one can be had for $10 on PSN. When it came out, it was a full-priced release ($40-50) packaged with Final Fantasy 4. Up next was the version I played, on the DS. This one had some additional content, and was again a full-priced game ($35), this time by itself. If you want this one now, it’s still about $30.
The iOS version has the expanded content of the DS version, and is still $10. in terms of value per dollar (if you think that way), it beats probably every AAA release of the past 2-3 years. It’s certainly longer lasting than a trip to the movies, and costs less, to boot.
I had a different (and generally more accurate) title for this post earlier, but I like this one better. Today’s post is about the gradual nerfing of content over time, also known as “catering to the casuals”. I’m here to say that this is a Good Thing.
Final Fantasy XIV launched with some relatively difficult endgame content in the Hard Mode Primal fights and the Binding Coil of Bahamut (which actually remained unbeaten until the final boss was fixed in a minor patch). Three major patches later, these aren’t the most difficult or rewarding content in the game, but they’re still mechanically unchanged. What has changed is that wiping in these instances gives you a buff that increases your stats, stacking up to five times. Also, there are some alternative paths to gear so these don’t have to be a bottleneck anymore. The Hard Mode Primals are still specifically required for the Relic Quest, which is how you get your continually up-gradable relic weapon for each class.
Bracing For Impact
Possibly because I’m convinced the player base in FF14 is from Bizzaro World, reaction to the nerfing of these instances has been mostly positive. They still require people to generally not stand in things, although it provides a bit of a buffer (Except on one fight in particular, because falling off of a small platform kills you no matter how much health you have). More importantly, all of the mechanics that would wipe the raid will still wipe the raid, so general knowledge and execution is still required. Usually (in other games), the reaction to something like this is a lot of whining that the people who beat it have their achievement invalidated, and that “casuals ruin everything”.
As a filthy casual: I hope developers keep ignoring the people who say this. It’s nice not to see the people who are joining the game now not struggling for money (because earning it was extremely difficult) or levels (because simply keeping up with the story quest was problematic at times). There’s a lot of space between effortless and overly punitive, and games don’t need to always go toward the latter.
Shovel Knight was a game that hit Kickstarter right around when “Kickstarter Fatigue” was setting in for me. I took note of it, saw that it looked mildly interesting, and resolved to get it if it ever came out. Fast forward about a year, and I found myself in possession of Shovel Knight on Steam. this became a bit of a topic for conversation in the podcast, which you can find below.
Thoughts, Extended
But that’s not the end of the story. Shovel Knight is a pretty awesome game, playing like a strange cross between Mega Man and Ducktales. Kodra also would throw in Zelda 2, but that’s before my time. The world map looks (and in some cases acts) like Super Mario Bros. 3. The game proper involves traveling to 8 stages and defeating the robot masters Order of No Quarter by hitting them and bouncing on their heads with a pogo stick shovel. After doing so, you can travel to the final stages and defeat the final boss and beat the game.
Meanwhile, there’s a bit of progression in a Zelda sort of sense. You get an inventory of relics that can be used for both combat and traversal. You can buy health upgrades, and different colored armors that grant different bonuses. You can even get two bottles Troupple Chalices that you can store potionsichor in. Relics are used in the same manner as subweapons in Castlevania.
References to games you may or may not have played aside, the game is incredibly fun. Learning how to use the shovel drop and the normal swing (and later, the charged swing) makes for compelling gameplay. The platforming asked of you during the levels (especially the final one) is very reminiscent of the early mega man games, including a tendency to put insta-kill spikes in unfortunate places. I highly recommend picking up Shovel Knight if you like any of the games I mentioned in the opening, or old-school games in general.
It’s interesting to consider the things that keep me from posting a blog post every day. I try to maintain a twice a week posting rate, although I haven’t done a good job of keeping to any particular schedule. There have been several times when I wrote most of a post and it hasn’t gone up until the next day, even though I spent probably under an hour on the actual writing part. This is examining the things that cause delays, in order to help me (and perhaps others) better avoid them this month.
1. Not Enough Pretty Pictures
I try to include some imagery with almost everything I post, but I’m not in the practice of taking screenshots much. I used to take more when I was playing WoW, but I got out of the habit when I started tanking raids. The boss’s feet and legs usually don’t make for a good screenshot, and I had other things in mind anyway.
What usually happens here is that I start to write something, realize I have no relevant screenshots, and delay the post until I can take some. I’m getting better at taking screenshots as I play (this is really easy for Steam games) so hopefully this one won’t happen as much in the future.
2. Not Interesting Enough
I originally had some grand standard in mind for my posts, that they should inform and entertain all at once, and also be on whatever the current hot topic is. Unfortunately, this isn’t really compatible with how I think or how I play games, so the posting schedule suffered. Some cool things did come out of it though, like the post about Transistor.
This venture is to teach me that there’s a middle ground between writing War and Peace and writing about my breakfast. It’s okay to post about random adventures in the things I’m doing. That’s what the blog’s allegedly about anyway.
3. Too Personal
This one doesn’t come up as much, but it has stopped me a few times. I attempted to write the post that became about podcasting a few times, but stopped because it primarily discusses me. This is a bigger hurdle than the others, for me. What I said there is true, I’m a fairly reserved person.
There’s time to fix that, I suppose. I have 29 more of these to write after this, and I can’t imagine I’ll keep myself out of all of them.
Edit:
I forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.
A while back, a friend posed a question to a group of us, asking what 15 games had most influenced us. Bel posted about it a while back, and I came up with my list around the same time. It’s now the first post of Blaugust. These are in roughly the order in which I encountered them, which means that they’re roughly arranged by date, but not quite. Trimming the list to 15 games is hard, and each of these led to other similar games in almost all cases.
Sonic 2 (1992)
This is the game I would credit with getting me into video games in general. My earliest memories of gaming are of me playing as Tails in this game. Tails is essentially invincible, but can be a valuable co-op partner if the person controlling him is good. Even if they’re not (and when this came out I certainly wasn’t), it’s not a real drawback. This being one of my first experiences is probably why I value co-op games so highly now.
Honorable Mention: Super Mario World
Overkill (1992)
I’ve talked about Overkill before, so I won’t expand here. This is the first game I “beat” on my own (Like a lot of games in the genre, Overkill starts again harder when you beat the last stage), and it established my love of scrolling shooters.
This is a bit of an odd case. I played Street Fighter 2 with friends before any of us knew what we were doing, or how to do a fireball motion or any of that, and found it fun. I learned what a Hadouken was too late to put any of it to practice in these matches or in the arcade, but memories of those experiences are why I found fighting games fun. I eventually enjoyed the more over-the-top games (BlazBlue, Marvel vs. Capcom) more than Street Fighter, but this one remains special.
Honorable Mention: Tekken 2
Illusion of Gaia (1994)
Illusion of Gaia (or Illusion of Time if you’re in Europe) was my first “Action-RPG” of sorts. This is the game that taught me that games could have actual stories beyond “rescue the princess” or “stop the bad guy”. This game in particular is somewhat difficult, so I didn’t actually beat it on a real SNES; I played it to completion on an emulator years later.
Mario Kart 64 (1997)
The joy of multiplayer, now with twice the players. Mario Kart 64 was my first 4-player game, and therefore the first game around which gatherings were specifically held. Prior to this, gaming was something my friends and I did while hanging out, this marked the start of hanging out specifically to play games.
Honorable Mention: Star Fox 64
Mega Man X4 / Mega Man 8 (1997)
These released in the same year, use almost the same sprite for the main character, and were played by me literally back to back, so they can share this slot. They also share terrible voice acting (but I didn’t know better back then) and relatively high difficulty (which is common to the series). This was the expansion of my earlier enjoyment of the Mario and Sonic games, but with an additional layer of complexity that wasn’t just “jump on enemies”. I went back and played a lot of the earlier games later, and they’re also great. The same can’t be said for what came after…
Pokemon Red/Blue (1998)
This might as well be My First JRPG, but it’s hiding some ridiculousness underneath. The simple nature of this game and ease of understanding the basics got me in, and trading with friends kept me in. As I got older, I grew to enjoy the complicated parts.
Legend of Dragoon (2000)
This game made me aware that JRPGs as a genre were a thing I was interested in. Legend of Dragoon grabbed me in a way Final Fantasy 7 did not*, and it became my life for a period of time in 2001. The story is a bit cliché, and the translation is terribad (they couldn’t keep things consistent). But the combat system requiring timed button presses is fun (others have described it as “tedious”) and it has beautiful backgrounds and animations for the PS1 era.
*I died to the guard scorpion because I didn’t know “Attack while the tail’s up” was a mistranslation and it’s the same ATB tutorial boss the series used since FF4. I was 10; I hadn’t played any of the SNES games yet.
Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
AKA the most fun I had with a multiplayer game since Mario Kart. Despite what some people say, this is a fighting game at its core, so a lot of the same principles of spacing and timing apply. At the same time, the simple nature of inputs and the chaotic nature of combat allow for people without much knowledge of the game to play and have fun. The skill ceiling is rather high, so it’s possible to see experienced players completely destroy beginners, but it can stay fun as long as the skill gap isn’t too wide.
Final Fantasy 5 (1992)
My favorite Final Fantasy, which is surprising when people learn I played this after 4 and 6, and it was the fan-translated version on an emulator. I’ve also talked about this one before. (As a reminder, you have exactly one month to finish/join the Fiesta.) My love of systems was established by this game, and it hasn’t worn off. Pieces of it still shine through in later Final Fantasy games, most notably in Tactics, X-2, and 14.
Shining Soul 2 (2004)
This is probably the game in the list that other people are least likely to have played. Shining Soul is a dungeon crawler of sorts for the Game Boy Advance, featuring a variety of characters and a very simple story. I picked this up because I liked the dragon, but I ended up playing more of the wolf. I’m fairly certain this was the start of my trend of playing non-humans in things that allow it, in addition to the start of me actually enjoying dungeon crawlers.
Honorable Mention: Diablo 2
World of Warcraft (2004)
I didn’t play WoW until 2007, right when Burning Crusade came out. By sheer virtue of the number of players it had at its peak, World of Warcraft was the first MMO for many people, and I count myself among that crowd. It’s thanks to WoW that I met a bunch of the people I now associate with, including Belghast and Kodra. It’s had ups, it’s had downs, but what I think of as an MMO is shaped almost entirely by World of Warcraft, from my preferred roles to what kinds of classes I like.
Mass Effect (2008)
Mostly what Mass Effect did was teach (or re-teach) that I didn’t dislike shooters. I played a bunch of Goldeneye when that was relevant, and a fair bit of Halo 2 in high school, but after that everything seemed to be Call of Duty and competitive multiplayer, and I wasn’t a big fan. Mass Effect brought me back in a number of ways, mostly thanks to RPG mechanics and abilities. Mass Effect 3 did even more, thanks to the greatly expanded abilities on show in the multiplayer.
Bastion (2011)
Bastion is a marvel of sound design. It’s also pretty and plays well, but those are honestly secondary to the music and the narration. This opened me up to the difference sound can make in a game. Without the work of Darren Korb and Logan Cunningham, Bastion would be a good, but not terribly special top-down action game, and it would draw unfavorable comparisons to things like Diablo or Sacred 2. The music and voice are what distinguish it. (My personal favorite track is Spike in a Rail.)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
I played Oblivion when it came out and didn’t like it very much. I tried it again in 2008 and liked it more, but not enough to “finish” it. Skyrim engaged me in a way that Oblivion did not, and the streamlining of certain things (like attributes) made the experience much more enjoyable for me. Oblivion (and GTA) made me think I didn’t like Open World games, and Skyrim taught me otherwise.
Honorable Mention: Saint’s Row 3
Final Words
Now that I’m here at the end, this is kind of a ridiculous post. Expect most of my Blaugust posts to be about a 5th of this. Thanks to MobyGames for the vast majority of the screenshots.
Edit:
Forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.
The major advantage to writing a blog post in the afternoon is that I can “borrow” topics from people who post in the morning. This has been convenient more than a few times, and today is one of those times. Belghast has been posting daily since April of last year, and today he challenged others to do the same for the month of August. And to that, I think I have only one thing to say:
Challenge Accepted
There are two main reasons I started blogging during this year’s NBI. The first was to have a bit of an outlet for my random thoughts, because I have a lot of random thoughts, mostly (but not entirely) relating to gaming. The second reason was simply to write more. I’ve been sticking to two posts a week, albeit rather erratically, and I think I could probably kick it up a few notches. I’m generally a rather reserved person, and this has helped me to express some things I otherwise might not have.
With Reservations
As an additional note, Bel mentions posting a bit more personally, and I don’t think that’s going to happen this month. I’d like to keep this web space a bit more focused on my hobbies, rather than my personal life. But expect to see an expansion in the types of things I talk about, because staying focused on one thing for days at a time is just unlikely to happen for me. (Then again, my yearly obsession with FF5 does paint a different picture.) It’ll be an experiment for me. I don’t know how grand it will end up, but it should at least be entertaining. If you’re interested in doing the same, the community is here on Anook.
