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Monday Gaming Diary: I’ve realized why I haven’t played Destiny

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Destiny

Another week, another batch of gaming friends asking why I haven’t played Destiny yet. I constantly say I don’t have time, and in part, that is true. I haven’t had time to play a second of Final Fantasy XIV, and that’s one I really do want to play. I do find plenty of other games to play instead of Destiny, even though I can now say I legitimately don’t own the game. I gave my CE to Blake, and he’s going to trade it with his regular copy of the game. We haven’t completed the trade yet, and it’s not bothering me in the slightest.

I know I don’t want to play Destiny, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I realized exactly why that is.

It’s only partly because I have people hounding me to play it. True fact: if you want me to do/read/watch/play something, don’t bombard me about it every time we chat or even every other time. Pass along your recommendation and move on. Constant barrages of OMG YOU HAVE TO DO THIS will only put off my motivation to do whatever it is you want me to do. Most likely, I’ll never do it. I never said this is one of my better character traits, but it is what it is.

So my friends asking me about it is only partly to blame.

The big barrier is the fanboyism. My Twitter feed is constantly full of people tweeting OMG THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER! People proudly announcing how long it took them to grind to get enough light pants to reach level 30. I thought grinding was an annoying thing, not something to really celebrate. Then they talk about the emotes, Legendary gear or engrams or whatever, going on raids (but this is totes not an MMO!), blah blah blah and my eyes glaze over. I’m so glad you all love this game so much, but do I have to be inundated with frothing fanboy comments? This is just like Halo!

OH.

MY.

GOD.

OHMYGOD. I am having the exact same reaction I had to Halo. I refused to give Halo a chance, outright refused. Everyone I knew who was into Halo was a diehard fanboy and couldn’t talk about the game rationally. More OMG BEST GAME EVAR!!11!! crap whenever anything Halo-related was leaked. I never thought about touching Halo until I was assigned to review the Anniversary edition for Gaming Angels. I think my exact response was, “Well, fuck.” And I couldn’t get out of the assignment because I was the shooter gaming editor. You can’t not review Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary when you are the shooter game expert. Well, fuck. Fine. Give me the stupid game.

And as they say, the rest is history.

So there it is; I’m going against Destiny for the same reasons I went against Halo. Perhaps if I play Destiny, I’ll love it as much as Halo. My boss says that won’t happen. He swears I’ll quit after two hours because of the grinding and lack of story. That may be true, but what Chris said about the game also has me intrigued that I could like it.

Nothing I can do about it now, as I still don’t have a copy of the game and I still have other games I will play instead. But Extra Life is coming up. That could be a good time to play the game once and for all and be done with it one way or another.

The Corner of Randomness: A Year with Destiny

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DestinyDestiny is about to enter its second year and boy has this game come a long way since its release. My interest in Destiny started because it was coming bundled with a white PS4. I was holding off on snagging this system until I had a few games I wanted to play, but the white PS4 is what ultimately pushed me to take the plunge and buy the system.

I had watched a few Destiny streams before deciding to sell a kidney so I could go buy the bundle. I knew that the game was a looter shooter; what I wasn’t ready for was the beta experience at the launch of the game. Destiny launched with things like the notorious loot cave, connection issues, no real end game content, and glitchy PVP. To the credit of Bungie, they fixed the issues in a timely fashion and within a few weeks the game was running fairly smoothly.

When I first started with Destiny, I was bored as hell. I tried the three classes but I couldn’t get into any of them. The story bored me. I wasn’t digging the difficulty curve or having to call up other people to help me get through certain portions of the game. The whole fantasy thing (wizards and knights) blended with a sci-fi setting was a weird pill to swallow. To say the least, I didn’t play that much at first.

However, fast forward a few months and Destiny has entered puberty. The Dark Below expansion released and there is finally some solid end game content. Items like Strike Playlists finally arrive. There are now goals such as a weekly nightfall strike, weekly heroic strikes, daily story missions, and running the same damn patrols over and over again. I start playing Destiny again and find a much more refined game. I couldn’t believe that I was starting having fun.

Not too soon after I start dipping my toes in the Destiny pool, The House of Wolves comes out. This adds even more content. Suddenly my brothers and I are playing every day. We are running Prison of Elders in hopes of finding great gear. I mean I snagged a Hawkmoon my very first trip through the prison. I get my first character to 32. I start working on a second character, of which I also get to 32. I’m having a ton of fun. I enjoy this game now. It’s become a bonding experience for me and two of my brothers as we play together on a weekly basis.

Destiny is once again evolving thanks to The Taken King. New level systems are going into place. Changes to basic things like rep grinding and currency are coming. Yeah, I know a lot of people are irritated that their beloved Gjallarhorn is getting a massive nerf, but this is an FPS MMO. The MMO part is what people need to understand. As expansions come along, some weapons and armor will just be left behind in favor of new gear. It’s just the way the MMO world works.

I must admit it. I am stupid excited to see where Destiny goes in year two. Year one was certainly more beta testing than anything else. Year two is already showing that Bungie has solid plans for this game and they want to provide the community one heck of a solid experience. I really look forward to seeing what I’ll be doing over the next year in this game. Yet, I am totally going to miss Dinklebot.

Monday Gaming Diary: Game-Free Vacation

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This nightly view was ROUGH to put up with.

This nightly view was ROUGH to put up with.

I actually went on a bona fide vacation last week with my family. Every year we go to the beach with the entire clan, where we swim a lot, eat a lot of fish tacos, and drink too much wine. Last year, I hauled down my PlayStation 3 to get my Diablo III on and play some LEGO games with my eldest. This year I decided to leave all of the big consoles at home, and I only brought my Vita. I figured this would be prime time to play some Mortal Kombat IX either on the long drive down or at night when everyone else went to bed. I never turned on my Vita once, and I have no regrets.

Sadly, I didn’t really play any games over the week, and that does make me sad because I brought Uno and Exploding Kittens for everyone to play. The cards stayed in their boxes, because we all ended up crashing early every night. Who knew that sun, swimming, and chasing after kids all day would make you so tired?

However, I did get a lot of reading done. I finished Halo: Contact Harvest and I’m two-thirds of the way through Halo: The Cole Protocol.  As much as I am bummed that I didn’t play any card games, especially with my eldest, at least I got some me-time in with reading. And since they were Halo books, I suppose they were kind of like gaming.

No matter to me, it was kind of nice being completely unplugged from the gaming world. Of course, now that I’m back and therefore must return to the grind, all I can think of is everything I need to play and work on. As far as the massive RPGs that I need to play goes, I’m thinking of working on Final Fantasy XIV. If nothing else, even if I hate it, I can use it as a feature for work since it will be my first MMO. That’s me, always thinking how I can turn something fun into productivity!

Oh and by the way, I haven’t plugged this enough yet, but if you aren’t reading the Mortal Kombat X comics yet, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.

The Corner of Randomness: Gen Con 2015

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gen-con-logoThanks to audio issues during our recording of the SGR Coffee Break, my Gen Con recap was lost. I figured why not try and write about it due to this loss. So, let’s see how this goes.

The most frequent question I get asked is what is Gen Con? It is a celebration of all things tabletop gaming, with some video gaming thrown in. Everything from Magic the Gathering to Star Trek Catan is consumed and enjoyed over the course of four sleepless days. If you have a favorite board game, there is a good chance there are several people willing to play it with you at this convention.

Gen Con runs over four days, usually at the end of July/beginning of August. This year, just over 61,000 gamers descended upon Indianapolis, Indiana to play games of all sorts. It’s insane to see so many people gathered in one spot to do nothing but have fun and spends ungodly amounts of money.

Over the course of Gen Con 2015, I played several new games. I went to bed no earlier than 3AM and awoke no later than 8:30AM. I shared a hotel room with four other people and we had a ball playing games and cracking adolescent level jokes. By the time Sunday rolled around, sleep deprivation was kicking in and we pretty much laughed at anything and everything.

Gen Con is something that is truly hard to put into words. It is an experience unlike any other and really needs to be experienced to comprehend just how big the con is, and the sheer variety of activities there are. 2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of this con, so if you get only one chance to attend it, that would be the one to plan for. I’ll see ya there!

Monday Gaming Diary: Halo Woes

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Since Halo 5: Guardians is releasing soonish, a friend and I have a plan to play all four of the first Halo games together to get prepared for it. Neither of us have really played much of the Halo: Master Chief Collection, and this seems like the perfect time to burn through these games and get prepared for the upcoming awesomeness that is sure to hit our Xbox Ones. I haven’t touched the MCC since my review, where I mostly just played Halo 2 so I could check out the improvements and test the multiplayer functions. The multiplayer experience was absolutely abysmal and was the exact reason why I gave the collection the low score that I did.

343 Industries has released numerous patches to fix these server issues, especially those with matchmaking. Since the game has been out for nearly a year, we assumed like the fools we are that the issues have been mostly fixed. We just want to play co-op, so what’s the big deal?

We’ve tried to play together a couple of times, and each time has had the same result: we can’t join each other’s games.

Halo Co-Op Connection Error

This was us for over an hour before we gave up.

The first time we tried, Xbox Live was down so we didn’t think much of it. We tried again over the weekend, and we were both met with problems. I could connect to the Internet via the Xbox One, but the multiplayer connectivity was down. It insisted we had some ports blocked on our modem, blah blah blah. The only way I could fix it was to directly plug in the ethernet cable from the Xbox One into the modem. Goddamn the Xbox One is picky when it comes to Internet. I couldn’t set up a wireless connection when I first bought the thing because it insisted the signal was too weak despite sitting in the same room as the modem and router. Now it has to be plugged into the modem to work for multiplayer. Picky, picky, picky.

Once we both got our multiplayer connectivity happy, we still could not join each other’s games. It didn’t matter who hosted; we received the same error message that we weren’t able to connect. We looked at forums, and we weren’t alone in these issues. 343’s server issues are still not fixed, as ridiculous as that sounds.

We’re going to try again this week before we both go out of town, but we’re both rather frustrated. Our plan was to play the first two games together and then meet up with Blake and Chris to play the last two with four players. If we can’t get two of us to connect, how in the world can we get four?

It’s ridiculous, 343, to still have these kinds of issues with your collection. I hope to God you’re planning more Beta tests for Halo 5: Guardians, because you obviously need extensive strain tests on your servers.

At least that night wasn’t a total wash. I finished reading my current Halo book instead of playing Halo.

 

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