NaCl

Something incredible has happened. Something so awesome, I didn't have time to update this blog for a few weeks. Which is a shame, because it turns out I'm approaching 90,000 hits on here. I know, this is absolutely nothing compared to the really popular stuff floating around the internet, but it still feels like a small achievement, so let me have this. :P

If you're a regular to this blog, you may be aware that I have reached an age where most of my friends have become incredibly boring. They spend more time raising their kids instead of playing video games. And in those rare moments where they could be playing games, they need to ask their significant others' permission. The other day I was hoping to get a session on GTA V going and one of the answers I got was, "I could probably show up for a couple hours next Thursday." I'm not making this up. If I want to enjoy 2 or so hours of multiplayer with my friends, I'm forced to make an appointment. At this point it's a lot quicker and easier to see my dentist or general physician.

"I get the tank and blow up the helicopters while you steal the meth and we'll be out before the cops arrive!"

Fortunately for me, I have a close friend, whose guitar-teaching skills grant him access to an incredibly valuable resource: Millenials. As in, young folk with the time and energy all of my older friends sorely lack. These last couple of weeks I've been playing ALL THE GAMES with them, all the time, every day, for so many hours, holy fuck. Warframe, Street Fighter, Black Ops, I'm currently looking into Killing Floor 2 and we'll get 'round to trying GTA V eventually. Whoa.

I'm not the social type and I generally prefer playing by myself, but it feels nice to log on to Warframe to find a whole bunch of people online when looking at the alliance chat. People ask for help when farming certain things or want modding advice and it's fun to see how a bunch of newcomers get to experience Warframe for the first time in its current state. The game has changed so much in its 3 years of "open beta" and it's fun to see how folks experience the tutorial missions, see certain bosses or features like Archwing for the first time. I've got all my frames and mods and arcanes and very little reason to log on outside of special events, so it's nice to be able to help these guys. With that said, Digital Extremes keep releasing fun new content. I'm quite fond of the new Inaros frame.

Of course he's cheap. Inaros can blind enemies regardless of their level, then onehit them with a crappy dagger and the corresponding instakill mod. But he looks awesome, he's incredibly fun to play and stabbing stuff in the face is a nice contrast to my usual playstyle, which tends to be a little less subtle. And he's not Valkyr levels of "I can remain in god mode for as long as I want" cheap, either.

The main problem with Warframe is its endless game modes. Enemies keep gaining levels and will become stronger and stronger until you decide to leave a mission. Spend only 15 or 20 minutes in a mission and just about every warframe is ridiculously powerful with the right gear and modifications. Spend an hour inside a mission that gets harder and harder as you progress and balancing goes all over the place. Some warframes can kill enemies regardless of their level, other frames won't do a dent against armored baddies and have to skip certain battles completely if they don't want to die in a single hit. And yes, certain warframes will die as quickly as that, while others get ridiculously broken amounts of health, shields, armor or simply trigger invulnerability or invisibility at will.

You are by no means required to play any mission for that long, but people tend to judge a frame and its strength by how long they last in these endless game modes. And the balancing drama and constant tweaking, fixing and revamping will never end until the developers put level caps on enemy units. I really wish that was a thing, because right now all we have is an endless cycle of enemies, frames, weapons and mods becoming stronger and stronger with every update, trivializing the non-endless content more and more all the time. It's what ultimately ruined Diablo 3 for me - farm legendaries, push forward to a whole new level inside a nephalem rift, find updated, "ancient" versions of your legendaries which are even more powerful, advance to an even higher rift level, rinse, repeat. No end, no limit - and absolutely zero meaning. If you can just keep on going forever, characters and enemies getting infinitely stronger, then what's the fucking point? There is no real progress, no sense of achievement, you just keep on going. I fear Warframe may be headed in the same direction.

In other news, I've invested in one of these babies:

I may put a sticker on there to cover the face of that creepy fat guy.

We've reached a point in Street Fighter V, where things may be getting a little more... well, I don't want to say "serious", because we're simply a bunch of incredibly awful players. But for what it counts, we're rather competitive among ourselves. Until now I've been playing SFV using either my old Xbox 360 controller or even my keyboard. Because frankly, playing 2-3 casual hours of Street Fighter a week against a bunch of friends really doesn't require special hardware. But now I'm the only idiot who still isn't using a fight stick, fight pad, fight anything.

I don't want to knock the Xbox 360 controller, because it's amazing for a great variety of games. But its D-Pad isn't exactly great for fighting games, especially when it's covered in the sticky remains of your unborn children. Seriously, try Pinnacle Game Profiler with one, use the maximum endless rumble setting and tell me you're not having any impure thoughts. But while that makes the controller even more fun, it also means I'll accidentally jump when I want to throw a Hadoken, I'll eventually break a thumb when trying to launch a critical art and certain advanced combos are simply impossible to do outside of training mode.

I'm a lazy bastard. I use nothing but the most basic attacks and heavy normals, simply because it's a pain in the ass to do any more than that on a 360 controller and because, frankly, it's good enough for now. We've tried the new 8 player lobbies last night and actually managed to get a whole 7 people in there. It was a fun, mostly lag-free experience, spectator mode was incredible and the only problem I see about the whole thing is our current skill gap. I repeatedly had to manually return to the bottom of the queue, because I won every single match and people were getting tired of playing against me.

Make no mistake. I'm fully aware of the fact that these guys are all highly motivated and practicing hard and it's only a matter of time until they'll get better than me. I'm ruling on borrowed time, but I'll enjoy it and rub it in for as long as it lasts. And nobody said I had to make this easy for them, so all the more reason to look into my very first fight pad. Haggy pointed out the above pad to me and it looks and sounds like something designed just for me. Its design is somewhere between the Megadrive/Genesis and Saturn pad, which is what I've been using for Street Fighter for over a decade. The pad is 15% smaller, which should be about perfect for my small hands.
The one thing that worries me is how this thing is made by Mad Catz, which I've only known for their incredibly cheap, shitty hardware. And this video is somewhat troubling.

Now I get to watch all my friends as they fight each other and try to avoid fighting me. Yay, I think?

If you don't have the time to watch that link, it shows somebody who has managed to wreck about half a dozen or so Mad Catz fight pads, which all ended up with stuck buttons and/or broken D-Pads, most of which were beyond repair. Of course that guy might have been mashing his hardware like an ox, but buying one of those things feels like a bit of a gamble, especially since the amazon reviews were pretty mixed.

For now, I won't expect too much. Ideally, the pad will work and should last me for a while and it may help improve precision on my part. I honestly don't know, because some people make it sound like fight pads and sticks are infinitely better than regular controllers, which kind of implies that I should be experiencing a noticeable performance boost. On the other hand, it's still just a lump of overpriced plastic and there's only so much you can do with two extra face buttons and a slightly less awful d-pad. In a perfect world I'll jump when I want to jump and hadoken when I want to hadoken, but I'm not hoping for any 20 hit ultra combos outside of practice mode. We'll see.

I haven't bought any special peripherals for a game since Wing Commander: Prophecy and Crimson Skies. But I really like Street Fighter and now that I have a bunch of friends to play against pretty much every day, all of which already have their controllers and sticks, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Now if only the damn thing would get here already!