Matthew Supert

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the past month or so, since it came out on the Xbox. People have been praising this game since August so I was pretty excited to get into the game. I am a huge D&D and TTRPG fan afterall, so the prospect of bringing that to a videogame seemed pretty exciting.

I’ve just hit Act 3 this past week and I think I am about 60-70 hours in. If I am being honest, I dont think I like this game very much and it almost entirely boils down to the combat.

But before we really get into that, let’s talk about some other things in the game that just don’t seem to connect with me. The game is very heavility influenced by the actual D&D roleplay mechanic system. Unforuntely, that brings all of the similar trappings that come with playing D&D, but without the benefit of having the ability to get contextual information or clarification form your dungeon master. Roleplay is probably my favorite part of D&D and Baldur’s Gate on the whoile does a pretty decent job of this. However, it obfuscates the skill checks and rolls in most roleplay or social situations. I very often will find myself in a conversation which results in a roll, but I have no way to know which character may be most appropriate for the situation or context. Furthermore, when a roll like Persuasion is required I have no idea what the stat for the chracter that I have select is. If the game didn’t explicitly have a dice roll in these situations, I probably wouldn’t care, but if it is going to show me that actual roll, every…single…time at least let me see what my modifier is before I select that as a dialog option.

Contextual clues are the biggest frustration I have with this game. There have been way too many situations where I am walking around the world where combat will just suddenly start, or worse yet, I think it will, and it doesn’t resulting in a conversation that has to preempt combat. Just today I wrestled with a combat scenario against some Githyanki in a hidden library. I must’ve run this combat 6-7 times. After getting obliterated the first time I tried to sneak and get surprise on the enemy for an attack. every single time I would get a spell off and then the conversation would trigger and then waste the concentrate or spell I just cast. I had a nearly identical level of frustration with the combat that occured at the entrance of the Moonrise Towers in Act 2.

I basically had to “cheese” the combat to get an upper hand due to the action economy. Almost every combat has significantly more combatants than your party.

Let’s continue our conversation though on that Githyanki fight and the way it was structured. There were two portals on the sides of the room, summoning in more Githyanki each round. Those portals were placed just sor perfectly to be out of reach of any of my spells like Fireball, etc. This is frustrating game design, because it is almost impossible to know that those exist until you fail at a first attempt of combat. There was no way going into that room to know how to position my characters and accommodate for that specific setup. So many of the combat encounters have this same sort of thing and it is just driving me away from wanting to continue to play.

Let's take a look at my year in gaming on Xbox. I am a bit surprised at this to be honest. I had no idea that I played 43 games. Deep Rock was definitely my most played game this year. I am surprised at my hours for Starfield. I cranked through that game in a couple of weeks and enjoyed it, but fell off pretty hard after the first ending. I didn't make to any subsequent NG+ games. 

https://thegameawards.com/

The 14th annual Video Game Awards (VGA) were on this past Thursday and I have probably watched this show every year for the past eight years or so. It is the only award show that I regularly look forward to and it really is a testament to Geoff Keighley who has organized and promoted this thing since its inception. 

I think there is something important about how the VGA's are approaching the  award show space that really sets them apart from many of the other shows out there. No one is watching the Oscars or Grammys right? They are boring as all hell. The Grammy's if anything should probably be pretty easy to make entertaining considering it is a music focused show, but the format is just straight up boring. 

The VGA's have nailed it though in creating an entertaining show and they have done it by leveraging the value of the entertainment format. It is an awards show first and foremost, but they do an excellent job of getting away from the endless monologue of "thank you" speeches. I think for all of the awards that they gave out on Thursday, maybe 5-8 people actually came up on stage to say thank you. They even had some of the awards given out at an off-stage camera position and it appeared as if the awardees there read from a teleprompter for their thank you speech to keep it nice and short. The worst part of the Oscars is the endless droning of thank you's that no one cares about from the actors, made worse often by their self inflated philanthropic or political posturing. No one cares and it isn't entertaining for anyone. 

The VGA's also do a really nice job of featuring some important awards on the show that others do not. For example, they do an award for accessibility in gaming, which is something that others need to be doing. Even if the Oscars are doing something like that, they aren't putting that on the screen. 

The VGA's fill most of their time though with trailers for upcoming games, which is the real reason why most people come to watch. They also then fill it in with some excellent musical performances from some of the best soundtracks of the year. The Oscars should be doing this exact same thing. Musical performances, seem like a no brainer, but trailers? That also seems like an easy win of self promotion for all involved. Show us trailers for new movies coming out the next year. Better yet, remember all of that cool and fun bonus content that we got on DVD's back in the day? Give us that content for all of the nominees. That stuff is largely gone as a result of online streaming and some of that stuff is great. That would be an easy way to fill in a show with entertaining information that ranges from a technical/artistic insight to simple outtakes and bloopers. People would love to watch that. 

Late into the Halloween game, but I wanted to share this adventure I wrote a few years ago and have consolidated into a proper document for other DM's to run. This takes H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon short story and turns it into an investigation adventure. 

I hope you enjoy. 

Updated: 10/09/2023 - Updated to fix grammar, typos, and some formatting issues. Improved newspaper layout for easier printing. 

We had a fantastic summer evening a few weeks ago and I. took Megan out to the Planetarium down in the city for a quick look at the city lights and to get some ice cream. 

A few weeks ago I sold my Dirtywave M8 to free up some funds and get an Akai MPC One. The Dirtywave was not jelling with me and I think my days as a tracker users have come and gone. I had the M8 for maybe a year and I was not able to really get anything productive out of it. Now, don't get me wrong, it is a super impressive piece of hardware, the workflow just wasn't quite working for me. 

I've had my eye on picking up an MPC for years. It is after all a fairly iconic piece of music equipment in its various iterations. An updated version of the One+ was release a few months ago and at a reasonable price of around $700 I figured this might be my opportunity time to jump into the MPC world. 

So far, I have to say that I am really digging the MPC. The sounds alone that came with it or that are available on Akai's website are impressive and pretty deep. There is a lot right out of the gate that can get you going with music. It is apparent though that many of the sounds are hiphop oriented and you can also tell from the legacy of the device how the sort of 80-115 BMP slow groove that comes from sampling exists. The sound libraries reenforce that and the sampling tools sort of reinforce that as well. I am super curious to see what sort of music I make on this device, because while you can certainly make "techno" or dance music, the vibe I get just seems a bit slower tempo. 

I am really taking this opportunity with the MPC to dig into the sampling, which is an area of music production I have never been proficient in. The One+ does have some synth plugins, but it appears that the CPU resources are fairly limited, and as I mentioned above, the pedigree just leans into that sampling world. You can see that right on the way the interface is designed, where "Sampler" and "Sample" edit or very prominently labeled on the front panel. 

I am working through the Akai Youtube channels introduction series and that is affording a pretty good intro on how the MPC works. It does have a bit of a learning curve, especially as someone who has now 20 years of using other groove boxes. Akai likes to use their own terminology for things. For example "quantization" is called "Time Control" or TC. Projects are broken down into Sequences, Tracks and then Programs. The Sequence is sort of how you would think of Patterns on other machines where you can have multiple tracks loaded into a sequence. Programs are basically the synth preset or drum kit that are loaded into a track. 

As far as I can tell the MPC also does not have a linear tracking song mode, as you might find in a traditional DAW or some other workstations. It seems in this respect it does follow the sort of traditional "tracker" style sequencing methodology where you can take your sequences (i.e. Sequence 1, Sequence 2, etc.) and then place them in an order you like to be triggered. You aren't sequencing the individual tracks. 

There are a couple of other really interesting features that I hope to dig into more. As one might expect the sampling features are very deep. There is some very impressive tools here that instantly make my realize why this is such a well regarded sampler. It even has a feature where you can trigger a synth via midi to play through a series of notes that can be recorded into the machine as a multi-sample. That sounds fantastic as I can see myself sampling my Command Station. I hope that importing a series of samples already setup as a multi-sampled instrument is just as simple.

So despite the machine itself being pretty fantastic, there are a handful of frustrations with the MPC that I have experienced so far. The first is the pads themselves. They are incredibly firm and have no "give" to them. I'm not sure if this how all MPC's are, but I was expecting something closer to the pads on my Command Station, so there is a bit of adjustment that needs to occur there. 

The second issue largely comes down to the product support. The MPC ships without a manual of any sort and to make matters even more frustration the .PDF manual that is online covers all of the products in the currently MPC line (One, Live, X) so moving through it to learn the product is a tedious endeavor. The sample libraries offered from Akai's website also are tied into the MPC Software which you install onto your computer. Looking through Reddit it does appear that there are ways to get around installing all of this software, but Akai intentionally makes it obtuse, utilizing .pkg installer files for the samples. Adding insult to injury on that front, the MPC Software and associated samples cannot be installed onto an external HDD, they are installed onto your computers main's HDD, which I resume most musicians don't do. 

Overall though a real nice piece of kit that I am enjoying and I anticipate utilizing quite a bit over the coming months.