Month: December 2018

Doing an about-face on social media

Posted on by Nimgimli

For the last few months I’ve been really down on social media. I found that too often spending time on the various services wound up depressing me rather than being a positive experience, so I vowed to give it up. I checked-out of Discords (where I’d been most active), stopped logging in to Facebook, vowed to never read comments on articles and avoided Reddit. Twitter was the only network I stayed active on and I tried to do my best to pull away from that.

At first I felt great. I had a lot more free time and felt a lot less stressed. I became an anti social-media zealot, telling anyone who would listen that it was toxic.

Except there was one catch. Without social media, there really was no one who would, or could, listen. As time went by I started to feel cut off and kind of lonely.

See, I’m more or less a recluse, by circumstance rather than design. I work from home, 100%. I don’t make friends easily and since moving to North Carolina really haven’t made any. I have Angela of course and she is terrific but other than her I can go days without talking to another human being (depending on how many work meetings are happening at the time). Since I work and she doesn’t, her job is to do the shopping and run errands so I never really have reason to go anywhere. I walk the dog, of course, but in the winter it’s generally dark and we don’t run into other dogs and their people as much as we do in spring/summer/fall.

Anyway, point is without any social media I was feeling really isolated. So I’m re-thinking my plan.

In 2018, I tried, with modest success, not to engage in topics that frustrate/annoy/sadden me. And by “engage” I mean that literally. I wrote plenty of irate responses but never hit “send” on them. I wasn’t 100% successful with this but I feel like I did OK about it.

In 2019 my goal is to try to find a way to just let these topics slide past me without them bothering me. Because I was bothered in 2018, I just didn’t get into arguments about things. I still felt down about them, which is where my ‘toxic social media’ feelings were coming from. I’m just not quite sure how to accomplish this “let things slide” idea.

In the past week or two I’ve tried to be more chatty on Twitter and tried to engage people on topics that I take delight in. Suddenly Twitter is becoming a source of pleasure again. Maybe it’s just a matter of having more good stuff than annoying stuff in my timeline?

I mean, I don’t want to seem like I’m sticking my head in the sand here, but the things that used to get me riled up were often really trivial. I’m cautious about giving an example because I don’t want to start a debate since that kind of defeats the purpose, but here is one that I don’t think I saw any of my friends said.

There was a thought circulating before the holiday that said something like “If you’re depressed and alone this year, don’t worry, things WILL get better.” So that seems like a positive message to a lot of people I guess. To me it just seems dismissive. You (random person who sent this) can’t know what the situation of the person reading your message is. Maybe they’re losing a battle with cancer. Maybe they’re older and have been watching friends and relatives die off. At some point in life, things will probably NOT get better. Mostly I think my problem with this ties into ageism (an issue I’m getting more and more passionate about). Young people think everyone has all the time in the world and it isn’t so.

Anyway, not to go into a long rant about that. My point was, I didn’t engage in any of these discussions because I KNOW that the people saying this were trying to be kind and positive, so what benefit could come from me going after them? But it did get to me. In 2019 I need to learn to just let stuff like this wash over me and not get me riled.

If I can do that, I think I can use social media as a way to feel more connected to other people. I still need to find “my tribe” but that’s a topic for another post.

Observations on how the ‘tone’ of a game impacts me

Posted on by Nimgimli

Lately I’ve been playing (and very much enjoying) a lot of Forza Horizon 4. I’m something like level 114 and most of that has come from just messing about for hours and hours rather than really chasing concrete goals or getting serious about the racing.

This weekend on Xbox, there’s a “Free Play” weekend for another racing game, The Crew 2, so I thought I’d try it out. It didn’t take long for me to decide that FH4 was a better game for me, but it took me a bit to understand why.

Yes, the driving controls in FH4 are better (IMO) but The Crew 2 has planes and boats, both of which I found pretty fun. My immediate reaction after a few plane and boat races was that I might purchase the game, but over the course of a couple hours I felt less and less inclination to do so.

That was because of the NPCs. Both games are very “lite” on story, but both do have NPCs here and there. I hate The Crew 2’s NPCs and their values/drives. (Am I reading too much into this?) They’re always gabbing on about social media and getting more followers and in general being “extreme” and in my head I’m always muttering “fuck social media and fuck you.” This isn’t just ‘flavor’ because to advance you need to attract more followers.

FH4’s NPCs are kind of bland and barely there, to be honest. Most of the time it’s you in the car listening to the radio and a DJ. The DJs have their own personalities but if one is bugging you, you can just change the station (or turn off the in-game radio and listen to your own music via Spotify or something).

Maybe not the best shot to illustrate The Crew 2 but it’s the only one I captured!

It took a nice long walk in a foggy drizzle for me to realize this was what was bugging me about The Crew 2. It just feels like Ubisoft is aiming their game squarely at an audience that isn’t me. This probably makes the game more interesting if you’re in their target audience, but less interesting if you aren’t. (BTW, I’m the guy that’ll stop playing a FPS if during the tutorial level there’s a Drill Sargent screaming at me and calling me a maggot. I’m The Thin Skinned Gamer.)

I could also imagine some players find FH4 too bland in terms of the ‘stuff other than driving’ experience but frankly I prefer bland to annoying when we talking about auxiliary content. The really dumb thing is, if The Crew 2 just talked about getting “fans” I probably wouldn’t mind it. I’m just sick to death of having social media being shoved down my throat all the time (it’s bad enough in the real world, I don’t want it in my escapist video game fantasies as well).

So yeah, my march into the dark heart of curmudgeon-dom continues… I’m really glad I’m not a game designer who has to try and please me. Thing is, though, there are SO MANY great games available these days that we gamers can afford to be really picky about which ones we like, y’know?

Switching it up in bed

Posted on by Nimgimli

I bought a Nintendo Switch because I am a sucker for hype and limited supply. It was back when Nintendo was struggling (or pretending to struggle, depending on how cynical you are) to keep units in stock on store shelves. I saw an opportunity to get one and went for it before Amazon (I think it was Amazon) sold out again.

Turns out it wasn’t a great decision for me. I set it up alongside the Xbox and PS4 and hooked it up to the TV and after a brief burst of new-toy infatuation, it sat there collecting dust. Truth is, I’m not a huge fan of the popular Nintendo IPs (I thought I was going to love Breath of the Wild but honestly it left me cold), and there’s no reason to play a multi-platform game on the Switch unless you’re taking advantage of its handheld mode. Plus virtually every multiplatform game is more expensive on Switch than on the other platforms.

I don’t really have a lot of use for a handheld since I don’t commute or spend much time out and about, and we have 3 televisions for 2 people so there isn’t much competition for big-screen time in our house. But dang it, I wanted to put that Switch to use because I do have a couple of games on it (Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk) that I wanted to play.

Then last week I got it in my head that I wanted to dip into mobile games. Not even sure why. My eyes are too crappy to really enjoy mobiles games on my phone, and my tablet is so old a lot of them won’t run on it. I was thinking seriously of spending $400-$500 on a new tablet when I thought of the Switch. Instead of mobile games, how about some handheld gaming?

So for the last few days I’ve been treating the Switch like a handheld. I play it a little in bed at night (though that IS cutting into my reading time) and keep it handy so when I have a few minutes of downtime here and there I can pick it up and play a bit. (I’ve cut way back on social media and these little moments are where I used to check my various “timelines” so the Switch is filling those gaps now.) This is working great for turn-based RPG Labyrinth of Refrain, which I restarted. And while the Switch on a 60″ 4K TV looks just OK, the 7″ (or whatever it is) Switch screen looks great.

We’ll see what happens when I try to play Xenoblade this way… I’m not sure it’ll work as well since that game requires some focus. But at the rate I’m going Labyrinth will take me months to get through, so we’ll worry about that problem when it arrives.

I know I’ve said it before, but I guess I’m bad at listening to my own advice. The Switch is a mediocre living room console (at least it is if you’re someone who cares about great graphics) but a pretty awesome handheld. If you want something to play on the TV, get an Xbox One X. If you want a handheld though, the Switch is where it’s at (not that it has much competition in that space).

Final Fantasy XIII – Revisiting an old non-favorite

Posted on by Nimgimli

When Final Fantasy XIII launched in 2009 I, along with many others, was pretty underwhelmed by it. My recollection of playing it was running down endless corridors fighting endless battles and finding the combat an odd mix of frustration and boredom.

More broadly I remember “the community” having 3 main issues with the game:
1) Way too linear
2) Too many cut scenes
3) Boring combat.

When Microsoft announced that Final Fantasy XIII was hitting their backwards compatibility system, my reaction was a shrug until I learned that it was also being enhanced for Xbox One X. I’m always curious about these titles. When it hit BC it was also really cheap, so I plunked down my $6.50 (I think that was the price) and gave it a whirl. People/sites with more patience than I have say the game runs at 1728p on the Xbox One X (vs 576p on the 360, 720P on PS3).

So it sure is pretty, but I’m surprised to find I’m finding it a lot more enjoyable than I did back in ye olde days, too. Mind you, the game play hasn’t changed but looking at that list of 3 problems I find they don’t bother me. Let’s take them one by one.

“Too many cut scenes” is a complaint I didn’t have back when the game launched and still don’t. I’m perfectly content to watch a nicely rendered cut scene.

The “way too linear” thing isn’t bothering me as much this time around and I think this is mostly due to expectation. I knew going in that I was going to be running down those corridors, as opposed to when I first bought the game and kept waiting for that bit to end. I’m told it DOES eventually end but I’m 13 or so hours into this new playthrough and it is still endless corridors.

Boring combat… this is the interesting one. It’s been 9 or so years but my vague recollection of my first attempt at playing FF XIII was that I fought the system the whole time, and now I’m leaning into it. You see, you don’t really play a character in XIII, it’s more like you play “Party Leader”. The game decides (at least for the first 13 hours!) who is going to be in your party and who you control, and while you can issue specific orders to the character you are controlling, you’re really meant to use the “auto-battle” most of the time. I never used the auto-battle because I didn’t want to give up that control, which resulted in battles being a little frantic and me picking the same skills over and over and over.

Instead of telling the character you’re controlling to cast a fireball, you’re supposed to be telling the party “Focus on attacking that baddie” or “You heal and you debuff” and so on. Once you glom onto playing this way it gets more interesting. (And of there there are still situations when you want to choose specific skills, but those cases should be the exception rather than the rule.)

Each character can level up several classes (in MMO terms) and most are familiar. Sentinel is a tank, Medic is the healer, Saboteur is a debuffer, and so on. When your setting up your party pre-battles, you put together “Paradigms” which basically means you set up groups of classes. So one paradigm might have 1 character as Medic and another as Sentinel. Another might have both characters as Ravagers (DPS) and a third would have one on debuff duty while the other is dishing out damage.

During the real-time battles, instead of focusing on the specifics of what the character you are controlling is doing, you concentrate on which paradigm should be active and what enemy to target. Characters change classes between rounds of combat. Really it becomes more a tactics game and an individual RPG combat game.

Here’s an example of the last minute of a fight against some trash mobs:

You see I mostly choose “auto-chain” for Vanille and Sazh I have no control over. In this battle I’m switching between the War & Peace paradigm (Vanille as Medi, Sazh as Commando) and the “Slash & Burn” paradigm (Vanille as Ravager, Sazh as Commando). By choosing auto-chain I let the AI decide specifically what skills Vanille will use, and it’ll base those decisions on what we know about the enemy. It basically makes the same choice you would most of the time anyway, so why not use it?

Anyway I don’t want to drone on forever about a game from 2009, but I’m surprised enough by how much I’m enjoying it that I felt the need to write a blog post about it. That alone is worth $6.50! And I mean, look at the detail on the critter character models that we were missing in 2009! (click to embiggen, as always)