Hello, “The Bazaar: Catch the Cash,” a tournament by PK Gaming in Hanoi, Vietnam

by   •   Face, Games, Highlights, Tempo
 

I already mentioned this in my blog post reviewing my flights on EVA Air from Los Angeles to Hanoi, but one of the major reasons I decided to travel to Hà Nội, Việt Nam was because my company Tempo’s game The Bazaar was having its very first community-run in-person esports event at PK Gaming Ngoại Giao Đoàn. This event happened earlier today (or yesterday, if you convert Hà Nội’s local time zone to my home time zone in Las Vegas).

As you probably expected, while I was in attendance, I took a lot of photographs.

The entryway to the gaming café had a banner advertising the tournament, which invited competitors to wander the bazaar in a paid event with a total cash prize pool of US$750.00.

The interior also had a banner, this one being significantly taller and larger.

Tempo’s Lead of People and Culture was also in attendance, and he was responsible for bringing over a bunch of prizes for the competitors.

There were some embroidered hoodies…

… some specially-branded mousepads in partnership with PK Gaming…

… and the grand prize trophy, a Founder’s Edition collectible statue of Dooley, one of the characters from The Bazaar.

I showed up pretty early, so while the venue was still almost empty, I had an opportunity to walk around and explore the rest of the gaming café.

As the players started trickling in, some of them got set up on the computers in the competition area and started warming up.

After everyone found their way to the café, the tournament started with a small opening ceremony by the casters.

Once all the rules were explained, the players took their positions and started playing.

The event was live streamed on Tempo’s Twitch channel from the “Alaska Zone” streaming booths.

This is a shot I got of the person who eventually went on to win the entire tournament.

As a reminder, I work solely on the corporate side of Tempo and have no involvement in game design or game development pretty much whatsoever, to the extent that I have literally never even played a single game of The Bazaar. It was an amusing experience going around and looking at people’s screens, only to be completely clueless as to what’s actually happening in the game.

The main stage of the gaming café was used to play the live stream for in-person spectators.

One of the spectators, of course, was the Dooley statue.

Once in a while, players would be brought into the casting booth after finishing a round so that they could get interviewed about their most recent game.

The tournament was going on for longer than I expected, so I decided to order some food from the on-site kitchen.

Their menu was in Vietnamese, and I couldn’t understand what their entrée options were, so I just went with the recommendation of one of the staff members at the gaming café. I ended up with some grilled chicken, vegetables, and white rice. This actually ended up being pretty unexpectedly delicious.

A handful of hours into the tournament, we were approaching the end, with only a couple players left needing to finish their final run.

I believe some people left early, but those who wanted to stick around gathered around the stage area to watch the final moments of gameplay.

Upon the conclusion of the tournament, the winner was crowned, and he received his limited edition Dooley statue.

In addition to the trophy, both the first place winner and the runner-ups received an envelope containing their cash prizes, and pretty much all participants got some form of consolation prize, be it a set of earbuds, a desk mat, or apparel.

After all the prizes were distributed, the casters gave their closing speech.

The tournament organizers hired an actual, professional photographer to take pictures throughout the event. I’m not sure what his name is so I can’t give proper credit at the moment, but I found these on PK Gaming Ngoại Giao Đoàn’s Facebook page in the Cộng Đồng The Bazaar group.

He captured this shot of me helping set some of the technical specifications of the live stream software to ensure a smooth broadcast…

… as well as this shot of me joining the casting booth for a little bit while the Vietnamese caster was busy helping tally up the final results.

Here’s a screenshot taken of the live broadcast from the short period during which I was filling in for one of the casters.

It is very amusing (and quite difficult) trying to be a commentator for a game that you’ve literally never personally played before and hardly even know the mechanics for. The other caster next to me hard carried both the play-by-play and color commentary, while I mainly contributed by telling stories of Tempo’s past and how The Bazaar came to become what it is today.

Before parting ways, we took a group photograph with everyone who stayed until the end of the event.

During my time at Tempo, I’ve been a member of the production teams behind a decent number of live events, so this one wasn’t particularly special for me. However, I could tell that everyone else in attendance was very excited for it, which was nice.

I went into this thinking the turnout would be in the low multi-hundreds. I didn’t know how or from where I established that expectation, but as you can see from the photographs, there were nowhere near even a single hundred competitors. With that being said, I might just be used to running events taking place in larger cities for more well-known games, and it’s possible that the turnout for “Catch the Cash” was still considered a success given the circumstances.

I thought the gaming café was decent and comparable in quality to some of the smaller and lower-budget gaming cafés you might find scattered throughout less populus areas of the United States. The food, though, was incredible. I found the chef and the literal full-blown kitchen to be amazing and comparable in quality to a very good street food vendor or a small family-owned restaurant that focuses on replicating authentic flavors derived from their local cuisines. I had two meals there—one on tournament day and one on the day prior during a walk-through preview—and both entrées were delicious.

With that being said, I had a persistent headache and an overall miserable time being in PK Gaming’s facility due to the smoking room.

Cigarette smoking is far more common in Việt Nam than it is in the United States. It is also far more socially and culturally accepted, so this gaming café had a designated smoking room indoors, directly in the center of the café. The smoking room had a door, but every time someone opened the door to go in or out, waves of cigarette smoke would escape and spread throughout the rest of the building.

As long as there’s good ventilation, it’s fine, right? Well, from what I could tell, it felt like they had no ventilation. They had fans running everywhere, so the cigarette smoke would expeditiously get blown around into all corners of the building to make sure everyone would smell it, while none of it got sucked up into the vents to be exchanged with fresh outdoor air.

Marinating in cigarette smoke for about 7 hours was horrific, and that alone was single-handedly enough to make me hate the entire thing. It is insane to me that everyone who showed up to compete had to be subjected to degrading their health from fairly dense second-hand smoke because some people were too lazy to spend one extra minute walking outdoors before smoking.

 

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The Adventures of TrugTrug and Parkzer in WoW Classic’s 20th Anniversary hardcore realms

by   •   Face, World of Warcraft
 

I don’t play video games that much anymore, but once in a while, I’ll still sign back on if a friend invites me to play.

Last year, my friend Doug Wreden and I played World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore on and off for about a month and had a pretty good time. It was a nostalgic experience for Doug; and for me, I enjoyed trying Classic for the first time and seeing from what the modern-day World of Warcraft evolved. I’m usually not a big fan of hardcore or permadeath game modes because I have very limited time to play games and I don’t want to constantly lose my progress and just do the starting area over and over again, but Doug finds softcore modes to be boring, and hardcore did technically add a lot more suspense and tension to the gameplay.

This year, Doug and I decided to join a guild called <OnlyFangs> and do another run of World of Warcraft: Classic in hardcore mode on the new realms released as part of the 20th Anniversary celebration. <OnlyFangs> is a guild generally reserved for Twitch streamers and other online content creators, and although I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a content creator, they were adding some additional twists to the gameplay to make it more interesting, so I still joined.

The guild has competitions among the different races, so naturally, as initiation for joining the guild, you have to take a sorting quiz to determine the race you’re allowed to play. I answered all the questions and ended up with Orc.

On the day of launch, I created an Orc Hunter and spawned into the Valley of Trials alongside hundreds of other players who had gotten in right as the servers opened.

Doug also created his character—a Troll Shaman named “TrugTrug,” a hybrid of “troll” and “DougDoug.” I just named myself “Parkzer,” but after seeing Doug’s character’s name, I regretted not naming myself “Orkzer” instead.

My first near-death experience promptly came at level 7 when Doug and I were on the Echo Isles questing. I wasn’t paying close-enough attention to World of Warcraft because I was distracted answering questions from my Twitch chat and I didn’t notice that my health was getting extremely low. I quickly ran away and dragged a Durotar Tiger into a group of other players in hopes that they would save me. Luckily, a fellow Orc named Orcadontis (who I imagine is a professional orthodontist) was nearby and finished off the tiger, saving my life.

And if you’re curious, the reason it says “YOU ARE LITERALLY TROLLING” and “RUN AWAY” in big letters on the center of my screen is because I use an add-on called WeakAuras, which allows you to make custom graphics that trigger based on conditions you specify. I set up an alert that blares an air horn and shows that bouncing text in the center of my screen in case I get low of health and don’t realize that I have to run away.

At level 10, Hunters gain the ability to tame a pet. Doug wanted his Twitch chat to be able to have agency over our gameplay, so he did a series of polls that determined that my first pet would be a crab named “Crabzer.”

… Crabzer promptly died because I sent him into a group of level 10 enemies when he was only level 6. Usually you can just revive your pet, but to add to the intensity of hardcore more, Doug wanted my pet to be hardcore as well. This meant Crabzer was dead forever. Doug required me to participate in a memorial ritual by removing all my armor and laying down (almost) naked next to Crabzer’s corpse.

My next pet was a crocodile named Croczer. Unsurprisingly, Croczer faced the same fate as Crabzer when we were in a cave and a random Mage pulled a ton of enemies, so I sent Croczer in to tank and he succumbed to overwhelming damage. … Yes, we did the same ritual for Croczer too.

It’s a running joke that I love to stop playing the main content and go off to fish in video games, specifically in MMORPGs where fishing is almost never the primary objective and is no more than a side task. World of Warcraft is no exception to this, so after Doug signed off for the night, I joined some of my Twitch viewers on a journey to Mulgore and Thunder Bluff because they said there were some nice, scenic fishing spots there.

The next day, Doug and I found a party of guildmates and cleared Ragefire Chasm, our first dungeon.

Later that night off-stream, I finally got a chance to level up my fishing. While in Orgrimmar, I was joined by Thor Hall from Pirate Software, with whom I had a pleasant chat using the Proximity Voice add-on. After reaching level 150 fishing, we took a ship and ventured to Booty Bay to purchase a special item—a book that would unlock the next tier of fishing. There is an overall level 20 requirement for that though in addition to the fishing level requirement, so I wasn’t yet able to read the book I had just bought.

On the fourth day of our adventure, we ran into an escort quest where the escortee has a very long respawn timer. In order to try and get as many people in on the quest as possible as to minimize the wait time, we partied up and invited someone from our guild as well. Hilariously, our guildmate had an add-on that automatically accepts, turns in, and advances all quests, so he managed to initiate the escort before Doug and I managed to turn in our quests and pick up the next one in the chain for the escort.

We stuck around for the respawn and waited for the next cycle. Being the brilliant, attentive, responsive gamer I am, I proceeded to miss turning in my quest for a second cycle in a row. Here I am eating a protein bar and realizing that the escortee was departing without me.

Back in town, I was reunited with Orcadontis, the guy who had saved me from the Durotar Tiger over ten levels ago.

He was roleplaying being ill and giving me dental advice with his dying breath, but my absolute favorite thing to do in roleplay scenarios is to pretend like I don’t understand what’s going on and breaking the fourth wall. As Orcadontis gasped that his death was approaching, I replied “no you’re fine, you’re at 100% health,” then walked away.

On day 5, we reached level 20 and learned our next set of important skills. For Doug’s Shaman, this was Ghost Wolf, a spell that turns him into wolf form and increases movement speed by 40%. For my Hunter, it was Aspect of the Cheetah, a spell that grants me 30% increased movement speed at the cost of being dazed for four seconds if I take damage while in cheetah form. Note that Ghost Wolf is materially and substantially better than Aspect of the Cheetah.

After doing a round of quests, Doug and I were returning to town. I had my character set to auto-follow Doug while I was answering questions from my Twitch chat. Doug said that he was going to run through a group of enemies, so I mindlessly said “ok” and continued talking with Twitch chat.

Remember how I mentioned that, not only is my movement speed buff weaker than Doug’s, but I also get dazed when I get hit? Doug was able to run through the enemies fine, but when I ran in after him, I got hit once and got slowed to a fraction of my movement speed.

From here, I had a truly next-level reaction to what was happening, composed of the following series of events:

  1. Spend five seconds looking around in confusion, trying to gauge how much trouble I am actually in.
  2. Spend an additional three seconds tabbing over to Discord to unmute myself so I can tell Doug I am in trouble.
  3. Try to kill the thing that is attacking me, then give up after two seconds.
  4. Try to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah so enemy attacks stop refreshing my daze, but realize that the hotkey I assigned to that was Alt+0, which is impossible for me to hit without either taking my left fingers off the movement keys or taking my right hand off my mouse.
  5. Bring my mouse pointer down to click the Aspect of the Cheetah button to turn it off, but misclick and start channeling Mend Pet instead.
  6. Finally click the correct button to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah, though not before having my daze reset for another 4 seconds.
  7. Try to run away, then realize that the retreat path I was taking was directly towards another camp filled with five more enemies.
  8. Use a health potion, but then forget to use the two other items on my hotbar that would have rooted an enemy and healed me more, thus potentially increasing my chances of survival.
  9. Run off a cliff to try and de-aggro the now four enemies carving line art into my back.
  10. Try to land on a small platform not too far down, miss, slide down the whole face of the entire cliff, then die of fall damage.

And the best part? Doug would have been perfectly fine, but after I unmuted and let him know that I had aggro, he turned around and ran back into the gargantuan group of enemies to try and help me. Even better, note that I had already wasted eight seconds at that point, so he was very far away and it’s not like there was anything he could’ve done anymore anyway.

He also died.

From what I gathered during my post-death debriefing session with Doug, when he announced that he was going to run through a group of enemies, what I was supposed to do was stop following him, split off from him, go all the way around the group of enemies via a different path by myself, and meet back up with him in town afterwards.

This was a pretty ridiculous way to die, and I’m going to be traveling soon anyway, so I’m not too disappointed at our demises. Many hardcore deaths are fairly anti-climactic (e.g., you’re fighting something and just end up taking too much damage too quickly and suddenly die out of nowhere), so I feel like this was definitely one of the more interesting ways for our run to end.

We’re not going to be creating new characters right away, though I guess there’s nothing stopping us from trying again at some point in the future…

 

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Hello, “Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue” in Plano of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, TX

by   •   Games, Travel
 

FTC Disclosure: I was not asked to write this blog post, I was not compensated cash for this review, and no third parties had an opportunity to review or request changes to this piece prior to its publication. However, I did receive material incentive to attend the event by way of an exclusive pre-release tour invitation and VIP access. The public retail value of VIP access is worth US$65.00. All other expenses, including travel and lodging, were self-funded.

 
I’ve played Minecraft twice in my life—once to try it out over a decade ago close to back when it was first released, and once last year to participate in a charity event that had one segment of the associated show take place in-game. Both times, I got pretty severe motion sickness because my brain doesn’t do too well with first-person perspective games with fast movement and warped field of view around the edges.

Knowing that, you’re probably surprised to find out that I flew to the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex in Texas and headed over to the city of Plano… for a Minecraft event.

Together with my friend Aidan, who runs the Skip the Tutorial channel on YouTube, I had an opportunity to try “Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue” two days before it opened to the general public. Minecraft Experience is an interactive experience taking place in the Minecraft world during which you navigate in succession through ten different rooms ranging from the spawn point to the underworld and ending at the trading post (i.e., gift shop).

I feel silly saying this, especially because I’m known to be fairly critical and difficult to please, and because this entire thing looks like it was made for small children… but I actually had a great time.

 
The interactive experience revolves around an Orb of Interaction, a little cube that acts like a dynamic remote-control extension of your body that allows you to send commands via movement to the sensors placed throughout the rooms. You use this device, along with your body, to influence the Minecraft world around you in ways that resemble actual gameplay within Minecraft.

Each room has a different way to interact with your surroundings. The spawn point limits you to just the basics so that there is a smooth learning curve, while later rooms will require you to use the orb in conjunction with your feet to gather resources. Every room was also very immersive—it was clear that all the sets were built out with a 360° perspective in mind.

At first, I was a little bored and didn’t really know what was going on because of how unfamiliar I was with Minecraft, but within the first few rooms, I hilariously managed to get very invested into the storyline. My friends and I ended up doing three total rounds through the experience; each time, I would notice new small things that made me appreciate the production team’s attention to detail.

My favorite part of the experience was a room where you had to combine certain raw materials in a certain sequence in order to produce building blocks necessary for the construction of a gateway. The difficulty of this room had ramped up substantially relative to the spawn point, and albeit fairly easy to intuit, you still had to pay attention to what was going on if you wanted to participate properly. The part I loved the most about this is that the recipe for the building blocks was apparently something that actually exists in Minecraft, so this is an opportunity for children to feel good about their gaming knowledge and possibly teach their parents what to do to emerge from the room victorious.

I also liked how much physical activity was integrated into the experience. I had to constantly move my Orb back and forth throughout a majority of the rooms, and near the end during the final boss fight, I nearly broke a sweat throwing felt “snowballs” at the screen to help deal damage to the enemy.

 
I went into this expecting it to be something like an exhibit hall out of BlizzCon, where there would just be some life-sized models of in-game assets, some important and notable relics on display, and maybe some gaming stations to play some exclusive Minecraft content. As you would imagine, my expectations were far exceeded when I realized this was actually a real experience and not just a miniature museum.

Even though I had a great time, it was clear that I wasn’t really the intended target audience. I’m sure some adult Minecraft superfans would love this too, but I think the main demographic for this experience is children and their parents. I think most young Minecraft players would find Minecraft Experience to be absolutely magical, feeling like a real-life video game protagonist. This is also an opportunity for parents to get more involved in their children’s lives and deepen their connection through one of their kids’ hobbies.

It looks like the most affordable general admission ticket costs US$32.00 per person on a weekday, with bulk-purchase discounts knocking down the ticket price by a few dollars per person for groups of four or more. Everyone’s financial situation is different so I can’t really broadly comment on whether this would be worth it, but compared to some other similar attractions like this in other major cities, I think this pricepoint is definitely within reason.

 
Here are some photographs I took during the experience:

 

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My thoughts on MapleStory after playing for one month

by   •   Games
 

My childhood best friend Ed Lam, who you might remember from my old League of Legends days as “Grainyrice,” grew up playing MapleStory (similar to how I grew up playing Neopets and RuneScape). I’ve always wanted to at least try it out, but I never really had a good opportunity to get pulled into it.

Lately, MapleStory has been running some marketing campaigns about their new content patch and the Hyper Burning promotion, where your leveling process is vastly expedited in earlier levels so you can get into the game quickly and join your friends who might be veteran players and are far ahead of you. On top of that, I had a holiday recess coming up from my work at Tempo, during which I would have some extra time to binge a video game. Thus, I figured this would probably be one of the better times to get started, so I decided to make a MapleStory character exactly one month ago.

I ended up picking Angelic Buster, I’ve been having a great time playing. During my holiday recess, I live streamed a lot of my MapleStory gameplay on Twitch, and I had a nice time in­ter­act­ing with viewers and learning about optimal ways to advance my progression. While streaming, a decent number of people asked me whether I would recommend that they play MapleStory too.

Everyone’s situation is different, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what MapleStory has to offer, so I don’t feel like I’m particularly qual­i­fied to answer that question. With that being said, I can still give some of my thoughts and first impressions of the game so that you are better able to make an informed decision for yourself.

 

  • MapleStory is often called a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), but I think it is also as much of a hack-and-slash (also known as a “beat ’em up”) as it is an MMORPG. I really like games like Path of Exile and Diablo III, and I feel like MapleStory, to some extent, is a more light-hearted version of the aforementioned two games.

    Combat is an important part of MapleStory, and the way you engage in combat is very satisfying. The skill animations are bright and flashy. The sound effects are striking and aggressive. The damage numbers make it feel like you are having a huge impact on the screen. Every time you use a skill, hear the corresponding sound, and see the corresponding damage numbers, you get a tiny little hit of dopamine that continues hundreds and thousands of times throughout a combat session.

  • The Hyper Burning event (where you gain two bonus levels for every single level-up you achieve) makes a huge difference in getting through the earlier levels. I especially recognized the difference because I had originally accidentally created a character without Hyper Burning, and then when I created a new one with Hyper Burning active, it felt far more refreshing.

    MapleStory is known for its grindy nature, similar to many other Korean MMORPGs. With Hyper Burning, you’re able to avoid pretty much all grinding and go from storyline to storyline, sometimes even skipping some because you are leveling so quickly. If you are playing MapleStory for the story and want to complete all the storylines in chronological order, you are still able to do that—nothing is explicitly stopping you from taking the gameplay slowly (though you obviously wouldn’t get meaningful experience from quests if you’re overleveled for the requirements). If you are playing MapleStory to reach level 260 as quickly as possible to join friends who have been playing for a while, this makes it so you’re not stuck in-game for months before reaching your goal.

  • The quest system can get a little confusing. The map and quest log system is far from the worst I’ve seen, but once in a while, I’ll end up with a quest where I can’t use the navigation system to show me where to go and I can’t find the provided destination anywhere on the map. Luckily, because of Hyper Burning, if I ever run into a situation like this, I can just skip the entire quest chain and do another quest line in a different zone and still have plenty of experience to continue leveling up, but if I didn’t have Hyper Burning, I would imagine this would get extremely frus­trat­ing.

    I have had some issues like this in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft before, but at least World of Warcraft has some extremely thorough fan sites that explain how to do certain difficult quests in excruciating detail; I’ve noticed that MapleStory does not have many resources like this, which makes things harder.

  • One side effect of Hyper Burning is that you get in the habit of skipping things. I was having so much fun leveling up and unlocking new zones that I missed some of the critical teaching quests that would explain core game mechanics. Because of this, I was doing fine up to a certain point, upon which my power level fell fairly sharply because I wasn’t taking advantage of all the power-boosting features I had available to me, because I didn’t know they existed. At that certain point, it was taking a very long time for me to kill enemies, which prompted me to start looking into what was going on.

    Yes, it is my own fault for not seeing these important quests, but I would appreciate it if MapleStory had these quests marked differently, similar to how Final Fantasy XIV has the “blue/purple plus-sign quests.”

  • I’m torn about the interface. A lot of it is clunky and has very strange interactions and limitations, but I also like the “classic” style of interfaces. A lot of the newer games (as well as apps, websites, and pretty much everything nowadays) make the interface way too “idiot friendly” by using big round buttons and hiding a lot of important information, so I appreciate the fact that MapleStory doesn’t assume their players are stupid and will instead just show you everything you need to know.

  • I nearly quit the game at level 200 because it was so overwhelming. There are a ton of new things dumped on you at the same time, and as I just mentioned, if you did not know they exist and do not start integrating the new unlocks into your gameplay, you reach a point where you literally cannot kill anything and cannot gain more experience.

    To be clear, I am almost certain that this is my own fault, because, again, I was way too excited with the progression and skipped too much quest text that probably explained to me how to use everything. Luckily, I was live streaming during that time, so my Twitch chat was able to guide me through everything. There were two particular members in chat who literally saved the game for me, as they walked me through literally eve­ry­thing step-by-step until it clicked enough for me to be able to deduce how to optimize that aspect of the game.

  • Even now, the way I’m supposed to get better gear is confusing and unclear to me. I was under the impression that gear would progressively go up little by little, like about 10 levels at a time, but I am hearing from some sources that it jumps from 150 to 200? The entire gearing process is very unintuitive, I haven’t really be able to find a comprehensive and reliable guide for gearing, and it doesn’t seem like there are any in-game resources on the topic.

 
Now that I’ve typed this all out, this seems a bit more disorganized and scatterbrained than I anticipated… but I guess that might be a good thing, as these are my unfiltered thoughts that are probably more comparable to asking a friend for their input, rather than looking like a polished review.

I’m level 245 now, and the leveling process has slowed substantially—but this time, it’s not because I’m doing anything wrong. Once you get to these levels, progressing to the next storyline quest is limited to once every five levels, and the only way to level up otherwise is to do daily/weekly quests, spe­cial events, and other day-limited tasks… or just grind killing mobs for long periods of time.

The reason I know I’m not doing anything wrong is because I am extremely powerful—one single spell cast is enough to clear out multiple enemies. I’ve managed to reach this point because Hyper Burning also gives you a lot of gear- and stat-enhancing items, so I used those to min-max and optimize my character. With all that done, now it’s just a matter of putting in a lot of time investment to level up, otherwise I just need to wait for daily and weekly tasks to reset.

Since the end of holiday recess, I’ve just been signing into MapleStory once a day for about half an hour at a time to finish all my daily reset tasks. With work picking back up, I now no longer have the time or motivation to play as obsessively as I did between Christmas and New Year’s, but playing and watching the animations and damage effects for a little bit per day is still satisfying and rewarding enough that I’ll stick to it until at least level 260.

 

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Re: “If you were in the Pokémon games, what would you pick as your team?”

by   •   Pokémon, Q&A
 

I’ve had somewhat limited exposure to video games as a kid—there were a few games that I played a ton of, but I didn’t play a wide variety of different games. Out of the games I did play, Pokémon is one of the games that I played a lot—my first Pokémon game was Yellow Version, I’ve played the games fairly seriously up until Generation IV, and I’ve at least had some degree of gameplay exposure up until Generation VI.

After people find out that I like Pokémon and even collect Absol cards of every type, variant, and language I can find, a lot of people ask what team I would have if I was a gym leader or another NPC in the Pokémon games.

I don’t think I would be the type of person to run a Pokémon Gym. I’m not really the type of person to look up to someone like people look up to gym leaders, or otherwise place people on a pedestal and respect them more than any other human being simply because of their status. Naturally, that means that I don’t want other people to do that to me either—I firmly believe that I am just a regular person who doesn’t need special treatment.

In alignment with that philosophy, I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a gym leader. However, I do like the idea of being in a Pokémon game as somewhat of a random encounter, similar to how you hunt Suicune, Raikou, and Entei in Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal—I am simply out exploring the lands like any other trainer, but with some luck, you can run into me and battle me out in the wild.

Scizor

Moves: U-Turn, Bullet Punch, Swords Dance, False Swipe
Ability: Technician
Nature: Adamant

I think Scizor would be a good lead for my party. It has a priority same-type attack bonus (STAB) move in Bullet Punch to quick­ly clear out wild encounters, Swords Dance to buff attack for longer battles, and U-Turn if he’s in trouble and needs to switch out.

I also like the idea of having False Swipe in the moveset, a move that otherwise would make no sense except for lore purposes. When I was younger and played Pokémon Gold on the Game Boy Color, Scizor was literally the Pokémon I used to catch wild Pokémon by bringing them down to 1 HP using False Swipe, and I think leaving that in acts as a nod to the practicality of my team and an indication that I am just a regular Pokémon trainer out catching and training Pokémon like everyone else.

Togekiss

Moves: Air Slash, Tri Attack, Flamethrower, Fly
Ability: Serene Grace
Nature: Timid

Back when I used to play Pokémon Showdown, I ended up picking Togekiss as my special attack sweeper (and I don’t quite re­mem­ber why). The Togepi evolution line isn’t particularly my favorite or anything, but I guess Togekiss has grown on me up to the point that I’d want to include it in my team.

Similar to False Swipe being on Scizor above, I like the idea of just randomly having Fly on Togekiss, as that would make sense lore-wise that I am a random encounter because I’m out adventuring. However, if I were to be implemented in a static location any­where, I would probably replace Fly with something like Ominous Wind to fully commit to the Serene Grace gimmick.

Espeon

Moves: Psychic, Hidden Power (Ice), Grass Knot, Substitute
Ability: Synchronize
Nature: Modest
Gender: Female

My second favorite Pokémon is Eevee. I like the fact that Eevee just looks like a normal pet that you could have in real life. I also like potential, i.e., the capacity and power of being able to do many things and/or whatever you want is very appealing to me. Eevee obviously has a lot of potential, considering that it can evolve into several different Pokémon of different types and stat dis­tri­bu­tions.

I like the idea of having a “pair” in my party, and Eevee evolutions seem like the best way to do that. Espeon and Umbreon also represent balance—light and dark, offensive and defensive—another one of my core values.

Espeon is strong but fragile. Umbreon is “there to protect her,” but I also like the idea of Espeon being able to stand up for her­self when needed, so I have her built as a special attacker with Substitute for a bit more durability.

Umbreon

Moves: Curse, Payback, Protect, Wish
Ability: Synchronize
Nature: Careful
Gender: Male
Item: Leftovers

I wouldn’t really consider myself an avid shiny hunter, but after I finish the storyline and have beaten the Elite Four a countless number of times, I do end up looking for some new things to do in-game. Umbreon would be a shiny on my team, not nec­es­sar­i­ly be­cause I’m enthralled to shiny hunt an Eevee, but mainly simply because I like the visuals of the blue in the sprite.

As you’d expect, Umbreon is on the team to break up the opponent’s momentum and try to put a stop to any sweepers that may have had an opportunity to set up. In theory, Umbreon could also support his partner Espeon by casting Wish for her to help her recover from the health penalty of using Substitute.

Empoleon

Moves: Aqua Jet, Swords Dance, Metal Claw, Earthquake
Ability: Torrent
Nature: Adamant

I like having a bit of chaos and unpredictability in my life. I know it’s become a meme now to “never let anyone know your next move,” but I do think there is real value in doing things in an unconventional way.

Empoleon is generally used as a special attacker (and sometimes a bulky one), so being a Swords Dance attack sweeper with a priority STAB water-type move that also gets boosted by its ability, a STAB steel-type move that can even further increase attack, and an all-around solid move in Earthquake is very powerful.

Absol

Moves: Night Slash, Psycho Cut, Stone Edge, Superpower
Ability: Super Luck
Nature: Adamant
Item: Scope Lens

My team wouldn’t be complete with my favorite Pokémon, Absol. Considering it is my favorite, if I were to spend time shiny hunting anything, Absol would be first in line, so I decided to put a shiny variant on my team.

In addition to its looks, another aspect of Absol I really like is its lore. It is often referred to as the Disaster Pokémon because it comes down from the mountains to warn people of upcoming disasters, but because of the timing, many people think it is Absol it­self that is bringing the doom. Because of this, I’ve specifically built my Absol around the theme of luck—both its ability and item increase its critical hit ratio, and three out of its four attacks inherently have higher critical hit rate.

Absol would be my signature Pokémon, and if the game allows me to have an overworld sprite, Absol would be the one standing by my side.

If you’d like to make a fan game or write fan fiction themed around Pokémon that includes me, keep in mind that you do not have to ask public figures for permission prior to including them in works of parody or transformative content, as long as you are not infringing on their right of publicity or com­mitting com­mer­cial appropriation.

With that being said, I actually enjoy seeing creative fan-made content, as long as it is not intended to falsely discredit my reputation, spread false in­for­ma­tion construed as statement of facts, imply any commercial endorsement or agreement, or otherwise be made in bad faith. If you plan on in­clud­ing me in your personal projects, you may use my team and lore from above, but also feel free to modify it in any way you’d like to fit the format of your work.

 

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The Adam Parkzer and Doug Wreden World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore saga

by   •   Face, World of Warcraft
 

Starting in mid-April, I joined my friend Doug Wreden in playing World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore.

For those who are unfamiliar, hardcore mode, also known as “perma-death,” is a modified way of playing a game that enforces various additional re­stric­tions, the most iconic of which prohibits you from ever dying, consequenced by being forced to delete your character. WoW Classic doesn’t have an official hardcore mode, but there is a fan-made add-on that implements the functionality, which Doug and I used.

Here is our saga.

 
I joined World of Warcraft during Mists of Pandaria and never played Classic. I’m not really a fan of classic games in general—I appreciate the quality-of-life improvements that game developers add to modern-day games, so I usually don’t go out of my way to play older games unless they are particularly nostalgic. With that being said, Doug somehow convinced me to join him on a duo adventure of WoW Classic hardcore.

Doug really wanted to play Druid, which limited us to the Night Elf race. My first character was a Hunter named Parkzerect, a combination of “Parkzer” and “erect,” because this is hardcore.

We got to level 2, at which point, Doug got bored of the Night Elf leveling zone and proposed bum-rushing our way to the Human leveling area. I didn’t know what that meant, but I agreed; we set off on our journey and promptly died to a level 20+ Young Wetlands Crocolisk.

For our second attempt, I made a Hunter named Parkzerecter, a combination of “Parkzer” and “erecter,” because we were just getting started and I was even more ready than before. After six levels, I discovered that clearly was not the case, because I sort of just randomly forgot to keep track of my health bar and died to a Vicious Grell, ending our run.

I’m not great at World of Warcraft: Classic, but I play a ton of MMORPGs. I was pretty tilted at my method of death, which I found to be inexcusable due to how basic and easily-preventable it was. To express my frustration, I named my next character Parkzerblind.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. We were both insane. We tried the bum-rush strategy a second time and promptly died to another Young Wetlands Crocolisk.

… Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. We tried the bum-rush strategy a third time on my fourth character, a Hunter named Pogzer because of how Pog it was to die over and over again.

As you’d expect… we were NOT insane, because this time, we died to some sort of strange swamp beast and not a Crocolisk. Very Pog.

In the spirit of actually not being insane, Doug came up with a different strategy to make it to an alternative leveling zone on our fifth characters—we swam. I put Doug on follow and he piloted himself and my Rogue Dogpit for literally 50 minutes through the ocean.

Miraculously, this was a successful journey. I’m generally a Shadow Priest one-trick pony and I know basically nothing about any other class, so the Rouge leveling experience was novel. One of my favorite parts about Rogue was its instant-cast ability, which was very convenient for tagging quest mobs.

There was one situation where a lot of other players were standing in an orderly line waiting for a spawn, and when Doug and I arrived, we joined the line. The line soon degenerated into chaos after some inconsiderate people showed up and tried to cut in line. Hilariously, after I realized there was no point in being respectful anymore, I said aloud, “I guess there’s no line anymore” … and then promptly proceeded to catch, tag, and steal the next spawn of the quest monster, effectively saving us potentially upwards of 20 minutes of waiting, had everyone else decided to continue using the line system.

We successfully made it to level 10, upon which I did the Rogue class quest. While doing the class quest, I had to find a treasure map, so I walked up to the target holding the loot and started attacking it. Suddenly, four Defias Bodyguards spawned out of nowhere and started attacking me.

I shrieked out to Doug for assistance, and he healed me… rerouting monster enmity to himself. Tanking four level 10 monsters as a level 10 is never great news, and unsurprisingly, he died. After their successful assassination, the guards went back to targeting me, and I died as well, ending our run.

So what happened? Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to attack the monster that had the treasure map. Instead, I was supposed to use my Stealth to enter his house undetected and use my Pickpocket ability to steal the treasure map. My lack of game mechanic knowledge caused our deaths, which was dis­ap­point­ing.

As a side note, remember how, in our second attempt, I died because I wasn’t paying attention to my health? I fixed that by installing an add-on that lets me create custom alerts. Now, when I descend below 40% health, an airhorn blares and the words “YOU ARE LITERALLY TROLLING” and “RUN AWAY” appear and start bouncing on my screen (which you will see in the next screenshot). It has been incredibly useful.

Doug and I were both pretty bummed that we lost our run just because I didn’t know a particular game mechanic and the quest text wasn’t explicitly clear about what I was supposed to do, so we booted up our sixth attempt with Dogspit the Rogue.

We made it to level 11, one level higher than before… but we died when Doug jumped into a pit to attack a melee quest mob and ended up taking too much damage from two additional rangers. I didn’t see them hiding behind terrain, but Doug said he did notice them, though it didn’t occur to him that they would deal so much damage.

I further compounded the problem by not properly focus-firing the lowest-health target—I thought I had killed the melee enemy and started sprinting towards the ranged ones, but apparently, I either missed my attack or canceled my attack animation and the melee enemy survived with a sliver of health, giving it enough time to make Doug flinch during his heal cast time and die by a margin of milliseconds.

At this point, we wanted to give up and refused to give up at the same time.

Attempt seven was Drooid the Hunter, which we managed to bring to level 12 (yet again, another one level higher than before), but failed our run when Doug… uh… drowned to death.

Attempt eight was Driud the Hunter, and at this point, both of us were pretty frustrated and mildly tilted. This death was very similar to our second attempt when I randomly died to a Vicious Grell; Doug ended up getting greedy and pulled a quest mob with a slow respawn timer while he was already under attack by a monster, and through a combination of unlucky respawns of regular mobs and falling under attack by even more enemies, we died.

Out of sheer stubbornness, we kept trying. It was infuriating that we kept on dying right after finishing the introductory zone, and we really wanted to get to level 20 and clear at least one dungeon. I created Dogmilk the Hunter to adventure together with Doug’s Druid Dogcheese for our ninth attempt.

At this point, as you’d expect, the Night Elf leveling zone was very, very boring. Luckily, there was apparently a Peggle add-on for World of Warcraft: Classic, which I eagerly installed. Doug has played a lot of Peggle, but this was my first time trying it. I got instantly hooked and proceeded to clear (all the orange pegs) and full clear (all the orange and blue pegs) every single one of the 13 levels in two days.

Peggle made leveling from 1 to 10 much more bearable, but it also came with its own risks… I got so invested into Peggle that I almost got our run dis­qual­i­fied three times. The first was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that I had to pick up the Stormwind flight path, and a few hours lat­er, Doug flew back to Stormwind while I was still stranded in the questing area (which is a problem, because both duo characters have to remain in the same zone and only have a 10-minute grace period). The second was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that Doug had logged out already to take a break for dinner (which is a problem, because both duo characters must be online together at all times in order for the duo run to be valid). The third was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that my ship had arrived back in town after Doug had finished his Druid-specific class quest, and I nearly kept riding the ship to the next destination.

I started actually having a lot of fun after we got past level 13 and realized we weren’t going to continue the “die after one more level” curse.

Doug and I also got much better at coordination, and we managed to survive multiple seemingly impossible situations, one of which involved being un­der attack by six enemies at the same time due to a combination of miscommunication, poor timing, bad respawn luck, and unexpectedly high aggro ranges.

After we got to the mid- to late teens in level, it felt like we actually had agency over our own lives, and if we played with good skill and synergy, we could survive sticky situations without feeling utterly helpless. I had a pet with Growl that I could use to juggle tanking aggro, we had multiple healing and buffing items to use at our disposal, and we had crowd control spells to slow or disable the enemies while we kited away.

 
So… we did it. We made it to level 20 and cleared both Deadmines and Wailing Cavern. I screen recorded our first dungeon to preserve the memory, and I live streamed our second dungeon on Twitch as my first stream in over 8 months.

Our Deadmines run went extremely smoothly because we had a highly competent and overqualified team, but our Wailing Cavern run was a lot more dicey, which made it far more interesting. I also enjoyed streaming again, and it was nice seeing and recognizing some old usernames from several years ago back when I used to stream more regularly, as well as a lot of new usernames from Doug’s community who joined in to watch.

Now that we finally achieved our goal, we’re both going to take a short break from obsessively grinding WoW Classic, but it’s definitely something we’re going to keep alive little-by-little over time to see just how far we can manage to take our characters.


Edit (May 28, 2023):

It hasn’t been too long since we cleared the dungeon, but unfortunately, our run has come to an end. We made it up to level 24, and while we were clear­ing some mobs in a(n apparently) dangerous area of Redridge Mountains, neither Doug nor I saw a patrolling group of enemies nearby. We were al­read­y en­gaged in combat with a few enemies, and by the time the patrolling group came into our field of vision, they had already aggroed onto Doug and beat him down pretty quickly, upon which I also fell shortly afterwards.

And with that, our World of Warcraft: Classic adventure comes to an end. We don’t want to try from scratch again anytime soon, but there are some ru­mors that an official version of hardcore mode may be coming to World of Warcraft: Classic, so if that happens, then we may make our return for at­tempt #10.

 

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