Tonight we start the show by letting you off the hook and explaining a reference that originally I was just going to make the show title without explaining. Bel has been playing an obsessive amount of Greedfall and it is the sort of experience that the deeper he gets into the game the more his opinion of it improves.  Tam has been playing Elsinore a game where you recast Hamlet with the goal of trying to get Ophelia to survive. In many ways he says this is the game that he wished Return of the Obra Dinn had been. Bel talks about TemTem the not-Pokemon MMORPG which will likely give the storied franchise a run for its money because it is really well done.  Kodra takes our advice and explores Into the Breach and has an “Oh Crap It’s 2 am, how did that happen” moment. Finally Bel is astonished that Theros Beyond Death brings back Underworld Dreams at Uncommon rarity.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Mighty Ferrite Bead
    • What it does do
    • What it cannot do
  • Greedfall
    • Improving Opinion
    • Games that Sucker Punch You
  • Elsinore
    • Obra Dinn with Better Story
  • TemTem
    • As close to a Pokemon MMORPG you can get without being sued
    • Legitimate Competition for Pokemon
  • Into the Breach
    • Oh Crap It’s 2 am
  • Theros Beyond Death
    • Underworld Dreams is Uncommon?
Direct download: aggrochat_episode285.mp3
Category:gaming -- posted at: 10:34am EDT

Tonight we start off with a discussion about Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 which just concluded and raised a little over 3 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.  From there we talk about Pax South 2020 and the interesting things Ashgar has encountered while being there. Bel goes into a diatribe about the Witcher games not doing a great job of explaining the cast of characters.  2020 is a year of game delays so far and we talk about a few of them and why we are mostly okay with them. We then close out with a long discussion about Fire Emblem: Three Houses which leads its way into a discussion about Tactics versus Strategy.

Featured Topics

  • Awesome Games Done Quick - January 2020
  • Pax South 2020
    • Indie Games
    • Small Publishers
    • Tabletop Gaming
  • The Witcher Problem
    • Related to the Destiny Problem
  • 2020 The Year of Delays
    • Wishing it meant no crunch time
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • Tactics vs Strategy
    • Perfect Information vs Learned Insight
Direct download: aggrochat_episode284.mp3
Category:gaming -- posted at: 11:08am EDT

As we work on our “Games of the Decade” show, one of the things that kept coming up was whether or not to put tabletop games on the list.  After some back and forth we decided that really the tabletop show was a show of its own, because this decade changed the status quo significantly.  There is a certain amount of hyperbole in the show title, but in truth this is the decade when D&D and Settlers of Catan started being sold at Walmart and Target, and you can’t get much more mainstream than that.  We talk about the meteoric explosion of tabletop gaming and some of the factors we feel potentially triggered it. It was a wildly meandering show and we found it impossible to come up with a bullet point list of what we discussed.  We almost completely missed miniature wargaming, which may end up being its own show at some point.

Topics Discussed

  • Pen and paper
  • Board games
  • Card games
  • Pop culture references
Direct download: aggrochat_episode283.mp3
Category:gaming -- posted at: 10:40am EDT

It is that time again, time for another games of the year show.  As is usually the case we fire up a google form and have each member of the AggroChat cast pick their top 5 picks for the year.  This then gets collated into the final list that we talked about during the show. This time around we had thirteen different titles to talk about, with the highest voted title getting 5 different votes from staff members.  Since we have talked at length about most of these games, the resulting discussion ends up being more a trip down memory lane than a deep dive.

Topics Discussed:

  • 2019 Games of the Year Show
    • Trials of Mana
    • Anthem
    • The Outer Worlds
    • Devil May Cry 5
    • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
    • World of Warcraft Classic
    • Greedfall
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
    • Jedi Fallen Order
    • Untitled Goose Game
    • Baba Is You
    • Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers
Direct download: aggrochat_episode282.mp3
Category:gaming -- posted at: 10:03am EDT

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