Baud Attitude

19 Years Blog! Also Resident Evil: Requiem.

Posted on March 3, 2026 by baudattitude

Today marks 19 years of occasionally screaming into the void, and I’m happy about that. The void is presumably less happy because it probably doesn’t like being screamed at but who cares, it’s just the void.

There are of course two reasons to be happy about doing something for 19 years. The first, and most basic, is that it means I’m still here. I’ve gone from being a rather bitter and cynical mid-30s guy who is pretty bad at video games to being a …actually kind of generally happy and positive mid-50s guy who is still, yes, pretty bad at video games.

Also in the last 19 years I have lost weight three times and only gained it back twice. Right now I am comfortably sitting at a BMI slightly over 21 and hoping I can keep it that way.

But nobody is here for diet tips! Let’s talk about a video game, and one featuring a character who is only slightly younger than me.

Back in October, when I’d just finished Silent Hill f and was looking for other spooky games to play, I settled on starting the Resident Evil series. Really, this was mostly because of the collaboration that Capcom had going with NIKKE, which I was playing daily at the time. I wanted to know who the characters were before I decided whether I was going to spend my precious limited currency on pulling for them.

Recently I haven’t really felt like logging into NIKKE that often, but Resident Evil kinda stuck. So I guess the collaboration worked out for Capcom. Weird.

Anyway, in the last five months I played all of the mainline RE games, started and dropped a few of the spin-offs, waffled about whether I was going to pay full price for the upcoming entry, and finally gave in and pre-ordered it when Fanatical had a roughly 20% discount on a Steam key. This marks the first time ever I have gotten to see a Steam game preload in encrypted form and unpack itself into playable files when the clock ticked over to release time.

Mind you, it unlocked at 9 PM Pacific time and my bedtime is usually 9:30 since I work really early, but I managed to keep my eyes open until a full hour after that to get some actual play in.

OK, OK, a good half hour of that was spent messing about with graphics options. It’s a PC game. You can’t just Press Any Button to Start. You need to decide what kind of tessellation you want.

Note: I don’t know what tessellation is.

BUT AFTER THAT ENTIRELY NECESSARY PROCESS, I got into it. And then I played for several hours every day until finishing it last night, only a few minutes before reading a completely unrelated Reddit thread where someone decided to randomly drop a rant involving huge late-game spoilers. I would have been very upset about reading that before experiencing them myself in the game, so I guess going a little over the top on play time was justified.

I will not drop spoilers here, or really get into the plot. I’ll just say that I quite enjoyed it, and then spend the rest of this post throwing in random screenshots and rambling on about the in-game computers. A large part of this game involves wandering around buildings that haven’t had any living inhabitants since 1998, so the computers on desks should reflect that time and I’m here to nit-pick how close Capcom came to getting it right.

Before that, though, the obligatory taxidermy raccoon appearance! This has been in every modern RE game starting with RE2 Remake and it took me an embarassingly long time before I understood why. It actually wasn’t until I said out loud “why is it always a raccoon?” and my ears heard the word “raccoon” and I finally got it.

And now on with the computers.

This oddly-squished PC/XT shows up a lot. Like, a LOT. It’s a little annoying how well it was modeled before someone on the team decided to scale it to about 60% of what an actual PC/XT would look like.

For the record, the case should be considerably wider than this monitor.

It’s difficult to see in this image, but it has the very common full-height floppy drive on one side and a half-height hard disk on the other side, with a plastic cover filling the empty space above the hard disk. This was probably an ST225, maybe a ST251 depending on how much budget the evil megacorporation had to throw at it… though considering they were stuck with machines of this vintage in 1998 it seems like they were really going cheap on IT.

The keyboard and mouse are also pretty anachronistic. That’s a PC/AT keyboard, and mice were pretty uncommon on XT-class machines. Not to mention, it has a scroll wheel.

Finally, the display looks like EGA or potentially VGA. Again, something that you COULD have squeezed into an XT… but it would be pretty unlikely.

Mind you, I did have a VGA card in my 10 Mhz XT clone back in the day. So I can certify that it was possible.

On the other hand, or rather the other side, things go all wrong.

Kudos to the designer for remembering the weird power output on the PC/XT power supply. For people who weren’t around at the time, the idea was that you plugged your computer into mains power and then your monitor into your computer, so you only had one power cable.

It also gets the normal I/O for a PC of the time. You have a DB25 parallel port, a DB9 serial port, and something that is probably a DB15 port for a joystick. Kinda weird to see that last on a PC being used in a corporate environment, but that was a typical combo card for a PC/XT-class machine. It probably also had a floppy controller and a battery-backed clock on the board.

On the other hand, there is no video output here. I mean, I’ll forgive them for not modeling the cables but there is absolutely nowhere to even connect a monitor. You would occasionally see Hercules graphics cards that included other I/O ports, and you could make an argument that maybe that’s the card we’re seeing here… but Hercules graphics was definitively monochrome.

So 8/10 front, 5/10 back. Moving on.

This Optiplex-looking thing shows up a few times as well and is WAY more in line with what you’d expect for 1998. One notable detail is the 3.5″ bay filled with a combo audio output / USB port insert. Pretty sure I had one of this exact type. 10/10 front.

Other interesting things here include a little PC tower that looks kinda like a period-appropriate Compaq Presario. I didn’t notice it at the time of taking this screenshot, or I would have actually gotten it in the flashlight beam. There’s something that looks kinda like a modern NAS but with no drives installed, and a return of the weird janky three-drive-bay PC previously seen at the end of RE4 Remake. Better shot of that below.

Yeah. This thing. Under the generic black desktop. We saw this in RE4 Remake and it is like nothing I’ve ever seen in real life. Since the computers in the modern RE games all seem to be modeled after real-world computers, I desperately want to know what this thing is based on. I assume it was only sold in Japan.

Proportions are a little squished on it as well, but it looks like a half-height floppy above a half-height hard disk, then a slot-loading optical drive to the right. This isn’t exactly the same 3d model we saw in RE4, because…

That version had 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppies on the left. Oh, and the NAS-looking thing in Requiem actually made an appearance here. The IIgs mouse doesn’t show up in Requiem though.

I’m not going to say much about the generic black desktop other than to say that it really doesn’t look period appropriate but since you don’t ever see it hooked up to a monitor and keyboard it may not actually be intended to be a computer. It could just be some other piece of random evil electronics.

The back of the tower isn’t bad.

This has a considerably more-reasonable complement of I/O ports. No motherboard video, which is good – it would have been entirely out of place in a 1998 PC. Presumably one of the add-on boards has a video output.

My first nit to pick is that this has entirely too many USB ports for 1998. It also only has a PS/2 keyboard port, where you’d typically have seen PS/2 ports for both keyboard AND mouse, and six channel audio was definitely not the norm. 7.5/10 for the back side.

Maybe Umbrella was finally getting around to replacing their XTs when they bought these things, and whoever was in charge of procurement was like, “OK, I had to make IBMs from 1984 last for over a decade, I am going to buy some high end stuff now because who knows when I’ll get to upgrade again…”

I like that. In fact, that’s my new mental canon from now on. Umbrella just has a painfully long refresh cycle on desktops. Back side now 9/10.

Also, interestingly enough, this particular evil megacorporation lab was all in on PCs. In Resident Evils 2 and 3, also set in 1998-era buildings, you saw a lot of Macs on desks. Those are completely gone in Requiem. So the procurement guy was a bit of a snob in that regard.

Whatever. PC/XTs, towers, some sort of weird presumably-Japanese-exclusive PC, these aren’t too weird. Right?

This is.

It’s hard to tell because every time you see this model it’s covered in dust but I swear to God that this is meant to be an Amiga 1000. There’s one ruined office building you crawl through where every desk with a computer on it is sporting an Amiga 1000. This is surreal, and possibly less likely than viruses that mutate people into 20-foot-tall snake monsters.

But then, this is Resident Evil and the science is highly questionable. As an example, part of the crafting system involves tracking down blood samples and analyzing them. Reasonable, if what you’re crafting is biological in nature…

…less reasonable when analyzing a blood sample teaches you how to make bullets.

Anyway, it was good! I think my top 5 modern RE games are now RE4 Remake, RE2 Remake, Requiem, RE6 and Village, more or less in that order though there is some potential for positions to change as I think about it.

Also I am very much looking forward to seeing some story DLC. Something the same scale as RE4’s Separate Ways would be awesome, but I’ll take smaller RE7-style DLCs if that’s what I can get.

Posted in Gaming, PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Now THIS is procrastination.

Posted on February 22, 2026 by baudattitude

So this weekend marked the third time I’ve gone back to a PS3 game to get the platinum trophy long after finishing the game, and I’ve set a new record that I’m unlikely to top any time soon.

Previous iterations of this were Assassin’s Creed II (7 years, 7 months) and Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters (12 years, 5 months).

This weekend’s was Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, at a whopping 15 years 5 months:

First finished in 2010

And Platinum in 2026

PoP: TFS isn’t a particularly long game. Back in 2010, I apparently played it over a weekend as all of my trophies are from September 10th through 12th, and this time was… well, technically I did play through the entire game, collecting all remaining trophies, in one rather long play session interrupted only by a half hour walk in the middle when my Apple Watch started yelling at me about not getting enough exercise today.

But… before I played through the game in “trophy hunter” mode, where you’re meticulously checking guides to make sure you’re not missing any collectibles and trying to get some of the fun, but silly combat achievements (hop on 30 enemies’ heads in a row without touching the ground), I decided that I should play through it without any of that, just to see the story again, and for some reason I actually own it on Xbox 360 as well as PS3 so I booted that up and ran through it over the course of about a week.

Xbox

So there’s some extra gamerscore. Gamerscore? GamerScore? I’ve never quite known where the capitalization goes in that. Microsoft’s guideline for developers seem to suggest it’s just “gamerscore” with no capital letters, so let’s go with that.

Fortunately, playing through the same game twice in a row wasn’t much of a burden in this case. I didn’t love ALL of the Prince of Persia games released in the 2000s, but the series had way more hits than misses and The Forgotten Sands is just a joy, if your personal concept of “joy” involves performing platforming challenges while avoiding spinning blades and other traps. It holds up decently in the looks department, as well. There are some weird bits of facial animation when characters are talking and the camera is in close, and I wasn’t stopping to take close looks at the textures, but I could definitely play games that look this good all day any day.

The other bit of enjoyment I got from the whole experience was sending pictures of my TV to friends my age and telling them I was “getting into retro gaming”. Look, the Xbox 360 is over 20 years old now. It’s retro.

I don’t own any current generation consoles, barring a Switch 2 which is kind of its own thing, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how well these old systems are holding on. You may not be able to buy games from an Xbox 360 any more, and it can’t watch purchased video content, but you can download your purchased games and it does connect up to Xbox Live to show you your friends list and upload achievement info. The PS3 has the same limitations with video content, but you can still buy games from its digital store if you’ve got some way to load money on to your account and don’t mind that the store is painfully slow.

Getting a screenshot of the achievements, though, that was fun. Neither playstation.com nor the Playstation app show you PS3 achievements, and the PS3 doesn’t have built in screenshot functionality. The eventual process I came up with was:

Boot a PS Vita. Find out that the 64GB memory card I imported from Japan at great cost many years ago has died. This was a known problem with this cards, so it was really only a matter of time. Steal a memory card from a second Vita.
Take screenshots of the achievements using the Vita.
Copy the screenshots from the Vita to the PS3, which you can thankfully do without installing Sony’s Content Manager program anywhere. I’m not sure if the CMA is still available or not, or if it even works on modern macOS, and I’m nearly two months into my Year Without Windows and didn’t want to break that streak.
Copy the screenshots to a USB drive on the PS3 and move them to my laptop that way.

As for why this is a record that I’m unlikely to top… well, honestly I don’t really have many PS3 games that would qualify as “finished years ago” left. Trophies weren’t a thing when the system launched and weren’t added to games until 2008, so many of the games I played pre-2010 simply didn’t have trophies. Some of them had trophies added retroactively (The Force Unleashed, for one) but I didn’t get trophy information when I played it the first time.

I guess I could do this for some of the older Xbox 360 titles. But the process of getting 1000/1000 in older Xbox 360 games could be quite… challenging, even ignoring the games that have multiplayer-only trophies that you simply can’t get any more. That’s probably a rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down.

Posted in ps3, videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Even less likely than the Year of the Linux Desktop: The year of the AAA Mac gaming?

Posted on February 9, 2026 by baudattitude

Screenshot

OK, so. I’ll admit that the number of modern high-budget console-style releases that have gotten Mac releases in the last few years can be easily counted without running out of fingers. For all that Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue, they really don’t emphasize games for their personal computers.

That being said, I played through Resident Evil 7 back in December and followed it up this month with Resident Evil Village (I’m just going to call it 8 from now on), both of which performed really well on my M2 Pro-equipped MacBook. I mean, sure, there was some upscaling trickery involved – but I was getting frame rates in the 100+ range and I rarely noticed that it wasn’t REALLY rendering a 2560×1440 screen.

I hadn’t finished a Resident Evil game before October of last year, so it’s been kind of interesting going through the entire series (or, at least, the mainline entries) in the span of about 4 months. I’m hopeful that there will be modernized remakes of 0 and Code Veronica at some point, because they seem pretty important to the overall plot but are really games I’m not patient enough to play in their current incarnations.

Resident Evils 7 and 8 were pretty different when compared to previous entries. The horror aspects were ramped up in 7, to the point where the opening couple of hours weren’t easy to get through, and 8 was still pretty disturbing at the beginning even if it doesn’t take long for you to start collecting weapons and being more of a threat to the various vampires, werewolves, zombies and …weird techno zombie things than they are to you.

Note: I play these games on the easy difficulty setting, for the most part.

8 was also pretty far out there in terms of how grounded it was, or rather wasn’t. I’m used to the series justifying almost anything supernatural-adjacent with “they’re a biological weapon, don’t think about it too hard” but 8 REALLY leaned into it.

Good time, though. Really, most of the series has been a good time. I’m not fond of the entries that go hard on the limited inventory and backtracking aspects, though I understand those have traditionally been hallmarks of the series, but even the worst of the mainline games were worth playing.

I’m now in the odd position of being caught up to a long-running series just before a new entry releases and not knowing exactly where I want to play it. Like, I could go with the PC version for the best visuals, or the Switch 2 version will probably be decent enough and that has its own advantages… or should I wait for a Mac port? They haven’t announced one, though it seems likely there will be one…

Of all of the various dilemmas of life, this is a pretty mild one. Somehow, I’ll probably spend more time on it than I spend on decisions that are actually important, though. 🙂

Posted in mac, videogames | Leave a comment

I Finished a Mascot Platformer

Posted on January 26, 2026 by baudattitude

It’s certainly nothing to brag about, but I was pretty happy to get through the last bits of Super Mario Bros. Wonder over the last week. I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Mario guy, but I happened to be in Japan on its release day and it just felt RIGHT to pick up the Big Nintendo Release on day one. I even got some swag with it!

That was, uh. October 2023. And let me assure you, it is not a particularly long game.

It also isn’t a game that demands that you play it non-stop, so I’ve just been picking it up occasionally and running through a couple of courses and then putting it down again. I had a lot of fun finding little hidden bits and searching for the Wonder Seeds in the levels so sometimes I’d play through a course a few times in a row. It’s not like the controls are particularly complicated, so there’s not much of a learning curve when you come back to it after a break.

I gotta say, it’s a good time. The Wonder Seed effects – where you’re playing as Mario, or one of Mario’s pals, then you pick up a doohickey and suddenly the entire level changes into some sort of fever dream – are probably my favorite thing ever in a Mario platformer, and I absolutely loved the little flowers cheering me on as I made my way to rescue the prin… oh, wait, Peach didn’t get kidnapped in this one. You’re just generically saving a kingdom from Bowser this time. Has that been a thing before?

Let’s ask an LLM.

I don’t think this is a complete list but apparently Mario occasionally DOES get a break from saving the princess. The relationship between Peach and Bowser is pretty confusing at times, though, so maybe sometimes she’s over at his place consensually? The eternal question of where Bowser’s kids come from may never be answered. But I digress.

Also, a small lake was drained to cool the servers that answered that incredibly pressing question. I should feel some shame.

Anyway. I ran to the right through a lot of levels. Sometimes I was turned into a giant spiky ball, sometimes a slime with a red cap on, sometimes the world flipped into a top-down dungeon view. All of it was good times. If I have any complaints at all, it’s that there weren’t enough ghost levels.

Eventually I got to the end of the levels, fought Bowser in an inspired vaguely rhythm-based Final Boss Battle, and we all lived happily ever after.

Look, flower says it’s so, I’m not going to question the flower.

None of my other recent trips to Japan have coincided with a major Nintendo release date. I did pick up Metroid Prime 4 about three days after its launch last December. I didn’t get any swag with it, though. I won’t be playing that next, but I’m sure I’ll get to it.

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

2026 still isn’t going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop, but…

Posted on December 31, 2025 by baudattitude

…well, maybe it will be my year. With some caveats.

I spent a lot of time this year working on homelab projects that involved Linux in one form or another – Proxmox and Unraid, Bazzite and Omarchy – and while there definitely have been quirks it has generally been positive.

At the same time, Windows has been getting insufferable. I already mostly use Windows as a platform for gaming, with all day to day work happening on macOS or iPadOS, but even that minimal exposure has been absolutely grating on my nerves.

I don’t even mind Windows 11 as an operating system, with the strong exception being that every time I try to figure out HDR on Windows it makes me want to throw the computer through the monitor and eliminate the problem in a direct fashion. It’s just the way Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to make the user experience roughly equivalent to using a cheap subsidized smartphone from a disreputable pay-as-you-go company. Apps appear on the start menu without me installing them. I get a weekly nag screen asking me if I want to start backing up to OneDrive yet, or if I would like to connect Windows to my cell phone (I don’t). Rage-inducing news headlines pop up from the widgets panel. I make the mistake of leaving a computer turned off for six months, and when I boot it again I get duplicate copies of everything in my OneDrive. I get really used to running Android apps on my desktop, and then the feature just disappears.

To be clear here, I’m talking about Windows 11 Professional. Not Home. I can only imagine the horrors of Home.

And the worst thing is that, when you come down to it, Microsoft’s services are genuinely pretty decent. I actually use the Microsoft Account sign-in feature. Copilot isn’t bad at helping fix my shell scripts. Xbox Live has the whole save game syncing and cross-platform thing down in a way that no other service touches.

But the desktop experience… I can’t even anymore. I am unable to even.

At the same time, there has been a ton of work happening in the Linux community to break down the last thing Windows had going for it, which was gaming.

Well. Let’s be honest. Valve has thrown a massive amount of money at the problem over the last several years, and there are just enough disgruntled smart people out there to put their own two cents in on top of that and now you can make a Linux system play just about any game worth playing. I acknowledge that I am consciously sorting some of the most popular games in the world into the “not worth playing” bucket by saying this, but eh.

Hence, I put together a reasonably capable AMD-based system and I am going to make a real go of trying to not use Windows at home in 2026. I am already down to only having one Windows system as it is – if possible, I’m going to avoid booting the thing other than to get files off of it as needed.

So let’s talk about the new computer for a little bit, because it’s adorable. The case I used – a Fractal Design Terra – was just a marvel of design and much easier to build in than other small form factor cases I’ve worked with in the past.

It’s sort of a sandwich design, where you install the power supply and motherboard on one side of a central spine and the GPU on the other side. The side and top panels pop off for the procedure and just snap back into place once you’re ready to button it up.

It looks awfully crowded from the top, and I was concerned about heat, but the whole thing is very well ventilated so I think it will be OK. It IS a bit of a space heater, though, and I’m certain the cat will eventually discover this.

I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, a 6700XT, and 16GB of memory in the thing. Basically, it’s PS5-level specs, maybe a little better but there’s going to be more overhead in a general purpose box compared to a dedicated gaming platform. It’s subjectively a lot prettier than a PS5 anyway.

And, yes, it also cost considerably more to put together than just buying a PS5 off the shelf.

I’m sorry, I meant more than buying a PS5 PRO off the shelf. Which almost certainly trounces it in performance. But I can’t play my Steam games on a PS5.

Fortunately all of the parts I used, except for the case, were ones I already had on hand from previous projects. So it was basically free, from a certain point of view.

For an OS, I waffled a bit between a few Linux distributions. I had used Bazzite with very good results for some experiments earlier in the year, and I also have a laptop that I have repurposed to run Omarchy for development work.

I eventually went with neither and picked CachyOS. For the record, I don’t recommend this if all you want to do is set up a game console equivalent system. Use Bazzite. I picked CachyOS specifically because I wanted to be able to use Synology Drive to sync the contents of folders between the Linux system and my NAS, and for that I needed to run a Linux variant that was more targeted at desktop users, but at the same time maybe not QUITE as obtuse as Omarchy.

Like, I still haven’t figured out how to copy and paste between terminal windows and the web browser in Omarchy. It’s a little too much for something where you just want to turn it on and launch Steam.

After some thought, I probably should have gone with Mint as it’s really taken the lead in the category of “Linux for people who don’t want to have to tinker with things too much” but I don’t mind some tinkering.

CachyOS has a neat feature where you can install a bunch of gaming-related software without needing to put any thought into it, so that had me covered for Steam, Epic, GoG and Amazon games. I needed to do a little more work to get Ubisoft Connect working and even more work to get the Big Fish Game manager working. The Venn diagram of “Linux gamers” and “Big Fish customers” is basically two circles at opposite ends of a basketball court, so there really isn’t much documentation on making it work on Linux. The game manager would launch but all of the text would be… screwy, to put it in technical terms. I wound up trying different versions of Wine until I found one that worked.

Most hardware has been plug and play. The only real trouble I had was trying to get my Xbox Series controller connected via Bluetooth, because it would appear in the Bluetooth Devices window and sort of flicker between a connected and disconnected state. Trying to look this up got me a ton of very helpful articles suggesting I install various packages and jump through configuration hoops and one rather small comment deep in a reddit thread saying I should update the firmware of the controller.

I DID need to use Windows for that, because the firmware updater is only available as a Windows Store application. But once it was done I was able to connect it and use it in games as you’d expect. I rather think I would have been better served by a nice 8bitdo controller, but again I am working with what I have on hand.

Side note, my Stadia controller works fine with an 8bitdo dongle. I did have problems where I had like three different wireless dongles plugged in within inches of each other on the back of the case and it made for some interesting interference with my wireless headphones, but I moved some of them to a hub and moved it about a foot away from the case and that seems to have helped.

Side side note: Naturally when I went to download the CachyOS installer and make a bootable flash drive, I reached for Rufus… and then realized that it was probably a good idea if I started my Windows free era by finding a non-Windows tool to make a bootable flash drive. So now I know about balenaEtcher which is cross platform even.

Anyway. It’s December 31st 2025! I’m going to keep track of every time I need to boot a Windows system for something in 2026, and I’ll see how it goes.

Posted in linux gaming, videogames | 1 Comment

Lucky Numbers Seven

Posted on December 20, 2025 by baudattitude

By an odd coincidence, I’ve played two games with “7” in the title recently, and both are sort of related to a larger project I have going on. So I want to talk about the games, and the project, and probably whatever else comes to mind while I’m typing this up.

That’s a polite way to say “Buckle up, I’m going to ramble incoherently for the next few pages.”

After Resident Evils 5 and 6, 7 (Should I say VII?) came as a real shock. No more mowing down hordes of zombies and zombie-related enemies as Professional Badasses Chris and/or Leon, you’re just a poor sap stuck in a crazy house full of cannibal hillbillies. And it’s freaky as all get out. So much so, in fact, that I moved OFF the big screen and onto my iPad where the smaller screen helped to considerably lessen the scare factor.

Oh, side note – big shout out to Capcom for including the iPad version when you buy the Mac version, and vice versa. With the exception of Resident Evil: Village, they did that for all of their recent Mac ports, and it’s appreciated.

Thankfully, the intensity drops a bit after about the first two hours of the game. I don’t think I could have played through the entire thing if it had stayed at the same level throughout.

But I did beat it! Admittedly on easy.

And then I played through the “Daughters”, “Not a Hero” and “End of Zoe” DLC expansions because I wanted to get more of the story.

Two of those expansions are very much action games, which was pretty cathartic after the main game. They serve pretty well to give a backstory and proper ending for the game, as well, so I’d really consider them mandatory.

And yes, I did say “Mac” because this is one of those rare cases where a relatively modern AAA title is playable on something with an Apple logo. The last similarly-recent game I tried was Stray, back in 2023, and it wasn’t a great experience compared to the Windows version. RE7 looked and played great, both at 1080P and at 4K upscaled from 1080P, on my M2 Pro MacBook Pro.

Note: I wasn’t insane enough to try 1440P or 4K native. And it IS technically a PS4 game so “it looks great” on a laptop from 2023 isn’t that much of a testimony. But I was pretty happy with the performance.

The other “7” game I played was nothing BUT action, being the latest roller-coaster-ride-with-guns from Activision.

Of the various sub-series under the overall Call of Duty brand, I have really come to enjoy the Black Ops titles the most. While there have been some stumbles, like the year it completely omitted the campaign mode, they have a completely different feel from the ripped-from-the-headlines Modern Warfare games. They get to jump all over history and they can get very weird at times.

CODBLOPS7 leans HEAVILY into the weird. I would put it right up with El Shaddai in terms of never knowing what the next level was going to throw at me, and I would like to be very clear that I am paying it a compliment there. It starts off with an almost depressingly by-the-numbers sequence where you and your team of heavily-armed buddies (well, not a team really, I’ll get to that) raid some secret laboratory run by Evil Corporation Seeking To Dominate The World Or Something, and then you all get exposed to some sort of crazy virus and then roughly half the levels are just drug-induced hallucinations of the highest order.

My favorite was a level that had you running down the LA freeways, only the the roads were twisted around and all seemed to have their own gravity so you would have cars on the “ceiling” and enemies shooting at you from the walls which were their floors. It was utterly bonkers and visually confusing in the best way.

Even the levels that didn’t take place inside hallucinations looked GOOD. Another high point was the Japan level which was all neon and colorful billboards.

Sorry that screenshots from the game are kind of dark, Windows has yet to figure out how to get a decent capture from an HDR display.

I didn’t take many screenshots, because one thing I will say against it is that the attention to little details in the world seemed a little lacking compared to older titles. No cool 80s tech to get shots of this time.

There was, at least, one scooter.

The other thing that seemed just peak silliness was a hacking mini-game that you run into occasionally. Seriously, I did not expect a pipe game in the middle of my Call of Duty.

There was also one weird …puzzle? Where you are locked in a room trying to find a passcode to open a door. It stood out because every other door in the game is either locked until you kill everything trying to kill you or simply requires you to walk up to it and push the “open door” button. For some reason, in this ONE CASE, they really wanted you to look around this room for a four digit number.

It’s 5912, by the way, or at least it was for me. Maybe it’s random!

In short, I really enjoyed the campaign… eventually. It does not start well and it has a weird focus on trying to make you play it in co-op mode, to the point where if you DO dare to play it solo it is a weirdly solitary experience where you are supposed to have three other characters with you, and they talk to you as if they are with you, but you only see them in cutscenes. Hence the “not a team really” caveat from before. Also, if you don’t watch the intro movie – you know, the actual lead-in to the story? – there is NO WAY to watch it again and you cannot wipe your entire progress and start a new game. So when you start this campaign, sit down and watch it because otherwise you are going to be stuck looking it up on YouTube.

Also it needed a title card along the lines of “This story is a sequel to Black Ops II, which you played a decade ago, so maybe go back and look up a summary eh?” but that is a minor point.

I acknowledge that very few people play the Calls of Duty for the campaigns, so my perspective on the game is not particularly applicable to the average player. For reference, here are my achievements for beating the last four games. Note the percentage of players who have done the same.

Yeah, it’s not very high. And it’s not like these are long games! I am told that if you play the BLOPS7 campaign in co-op mode, it’s like five hours long!

It took me considerably longer solo, but that’s expected. They really do not want you playing this without three ~~random people from Xbox Live~~ friends.

Anyway! I really wanted to get through this by the end of the year, because one of my goals for 2026 is to move completely away from Windows.

I already only keep Windows systems in the house for the purpose of playing games, but Linux has gotten considerably better in that regard and CrossOver, on the Mac, isn’t AS good as Proton but is still pretty decent.

Oh, right, that’s the big project I alluded to. Yup. After years of apologizing for Microsoft’s less-popular-quirks (I will STILL defend Windows Vista), I finally got broken by a Windows 11 prompt that kept popping up that had the choices of

Yes
“Ask me again in a week”

with no way to say “no, stop asking me and never ask me again”.

If I ever need to use Windows for work, or if Microsoft ever decides to drastically reverse course on their nonsense, maybe I’ll give it another try.

Neither CrossOver nor Proton can play games from Game Pass or from the Windows Store, however, so I needed to knock CoD out before the end of the year. I only have one more game in that category, which is a moderately-long RPG from Bandai-Namco called Scarlet Nexus. I should be able to get that off the backlog before the ball drops in Times Square.

Posted in mac, PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Random thoughts on visiting Japan (December 2025 edition)

Posted on December 14, 2025 by baudattitude

This is just a brain dump of things that stood out from a recent quick trip to Japan. Not exactly a high-effort post. Frankly, if I were an LLM I would be embarrassed to be spitting this out. As a human, I don’t feel shame so that’s not a problem.

Wait, is that supposed to go the other way? Anyway.

First, and this probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but the days of Japan as a “cash only” place seem to be very much behind us. I landed with only Y1000 in my wallet and immediately went to an ATM to take out Y30000, assuming I would need to make more ATM stops later.

I did not. In fact, I left Japan with Y6000 in bills, and that was after making an effort to spend some of my cash on the last day. Nearly everywhere takes Suica or Apple Pay and the rare places that took neither seemed just fine with a normal credit card.

This isn’t 100%! Do not think you can get around Japan with absolutely no cash! I have had to rescue a small group of Australians who found themselves at a café in Kyoto with no means to settle their bill! But in general cash is radically de-emphasized compared to a few years ago.

To continue the theme of money, prices are starting to fluctuate a bit, mostly on the more expensive side. It’s still an incredibly cheap place to visit, thanks to the current exchange rate, but I had the occasional price surprise when I was buying food at a combini or similar. On the other hand, going to see a movie was Y1400 and I remember plenty of times when I’ve had to drop Y2000 on a ticket in the past.

And a final bit on the topic of money – you can still get Tax Free shopping in a lot of stores. Some of them have started adding a 3% surcharge to process your tax free purchase, however. So for those stores it’s still a discount but like a 7% discount instead of 10%.

I am entirely in favor of this because processing a tax free transaction DOES take more time for the clerk at the register, it doesn’t affect locals, and it’s a way for Japan to extract a little extra money from tourists who are taking advantage of the exchange rate.

Akihabara continues to decline. I mean, it’s still a pretty neat neighborhood if you just want to be surrounded by nerd crap. But there are so many stores selling the same selection of random crane game and ichiban kuji prize figures and in general I find myself gravitating towards Ikebukuro and Shinjuku for my nerd shopping needs.

Granted, I would never expect to see one of these in the wild anywhere else in Tokyo:

At $300 I legitimately considered it for a solid minute but I did not want to try to get it home.

And of course, if you just want (thing) and do not want to try to hunt for (thing), Amazon is perfectly happy to deliver all the (thing) you could ever want to your hotel. Less fun than going shopping, I admit, but a time saver.

The area around Shibuya Station is kinda weird now! Like I know Hikarie and Shibuya Scramble Square have been there for a while but I hadn’t been down there during the day in years. The skyline is so different.

The view from Shibuya Sky is amazing though. 100% worth the entry fee if you’re there on a clear day. My entire week was clear skies and usually temperatures around 15C/60F. It felt like the country decided I needed a special treat.

Continuing with the Shibuya theme, I finally got a window seat at the Starbucks overlooking the scramble crossing! That was one super minor life goal that I was happy to achieve.

Knowing just a little Japanese remains a cheat code for getting amazing service. Well, honestly I think you will generally get amazing service in Japan wherever you are but at least looking like you’re making an effort gets you a smile to go with the service.

The Skylark franchise restaurants (Gust, Jonathan’s, Saizeriya etc) are still just fantastic value for money. I mean, they’re not fancy but they will feed you well for a small financial consideration.

This was a random dinner I had at Gust, which cost $7.12. I probably should have gotten a salad or you know something with vegetables, so this is a bit of an embarrassing example.

By contrast I had a single café mocha in the hotel coffee shop that cost more. If you want to save some of your travel money, find your nearest branch of the chain and eat happy. I guarantee you there is one within like half a mile wherever you are.

That’s probably enough random thoughts for today. Maybe these will be helpful to someone in the future who stumbles across this post. Or maybe some random AI bot will slurp them up and repeat them back at someone looking for Japan travel tips. Either way is fine really.

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In which, I test the limits of “remote work”

Posted on December 13, 2025 by baudattitude

So, a few years ago I wound up flying more than usual and wound up qualifying for United Airlines “Silver Premier” status. Which is the bottom tier of their frequent flyer program, but which comes with some really handy benefits like extra checked bags and pretty frequent upgrades, at least when flying domestic.

It was handy enough that, after the first year of it, I haven’t wanted to let it lapse. This has lead to the occasional very silly flight near the end of the year to make sure I’m meeting the requirements to keep it. Usually I fly to Redding because it’s cheap but involves a lot of flight segments.

Anyway, I spent a lot of 2025 unemployed so I was not doing much flying. As a result, keeping my silver status was looking really unlikely – it would have meant flying to Redding like 4 times! I actually have a favorite coffee place there, but it’s not worth the flight by itself.

On the other hand, international flights give a lot more credit towards flyer status, and I do like going to Japan… but there was no way on earth that I was going to get time off at this time of year, especially with little notice. I am very new to this job and I don’t have the seniority it would take to get a week off around the holidays.

On the (third?) hand… technically I was hired as a remote employee. And while it’s not strictly speaking legal to work (even remotely) while you’re in Japan on a tourist visa it’s not like I was worried about the police breaking down my hotel room door to tell me to log off the VPN. So technically I didn’t NEED to take time off as long as I just, you know, kept logging in and doing my job.

I mean, I wasn’t brave enough to get permission to do this. I’m working on the principle that nobody told me I couldn’t. Hopefully that will not come back to bite me.

The problem, naturally, being a 17 hour time difference between the place where my job expects me to be and the place where I wanted to be. I worked the math out, and I would need to be online from 1 AM until 10 AM Tokyo time to keep up my normal shift in the US.

Could I do this?

It turns out… yes! At least for a week. I’m not sure I would have wanted to try to keep it up any longer than that. I especially would not have wanted to try to stay on this schedule through a weekend, for reasons that will probably be obvious.

The schedule I was keeping was very similar to when I worked the graveyard shift as a 20-something. I’d wake up around 12:30 AM, log on to work, put in my shift and then get some living in between 10 AM and 5 PM, when I would crash again.

The reason this worked out for the five days I did it, but would have been a problem if I’d tried to keep it up was, well, there’s probably plenty to DO in Tokyo at 3 in the morning but probably very little of it is anything I would want to do.

Anyway, here were some of my takeaways from the experiment, starting with the things that didn’t go super well:

Firstly, I was expecting to be able to use the in-room TV as an external monitor. My job is absolutely impossible to do with a single screen and I didn’t want to bring along a bulky-yet-fragile portable monitor. Finding out that the hotel room I’d booked had a TV that was completely across the room from the only desk was, therefore, a bit of a setback.

Fortunately I had packed a HDMI-to-USB-C capture card, and there’s a free app for the iPad called Genki Studio that lets you use this to use the iPad as an external display. I only have an 11″ iPad, so text was VERY small, but I made it work.

Secondly, the chair in the room was painfully low. I wound up stacking every pillow I could find on it to get it up to a reasonable height.

Third, you would think that being in this sort of situation would make you really focus. It didn’t. I need distractions during my day and just didn’t have any really. I wound up eating WAY too much, and a lot of it was junk food. Towards the very end of the trip, I discovered that there was a supermarket next to the hotel so I was able to actually get some fresh fruit and yogurt instead of combini junk and felt much better about myself.

A side note: The hotel didn’t have in-room microwaves and there was no communal microwave. Eating my “breakfast” and “lunch” cold was depressing. Eventually I found that I could take my “lunch” at 5 AM and go and buy something from the nearby 7-11 which had microwaves.

Finally, I was happy to see that there was an ethernet jack under the mirror at the desk I was using to work from, and I’d even packed a USB-C ethernet dongle. I was less happy to find that the jack was completely dead. I poked around the room a bit and discovered that I could sort-of get to the infrastructure…

…but even plugging directly into the switch, I was only getting about 100mbps. Which wasn’t any faster than the WiFi. So I suspect that they only give each room 100mbps to work with, though admittedly that is PLENTY for Slack and email and the occasional Zoom meeting.

(Oh, on the topic of Slack? It tried very hard to rat me out. It was like “this person appears to be in Japan! let’s set their out of office statuses accordingly!” and I had to override it to tell it to pretend I was in California.)

OK, that’s the negatives. There were some things that were awesome about working those hours, starting with the fact that I would get off work at 10 AM, just as things were opening but before any crowds could form. That is my new pro tip for Tokyo travel – be at the place you want to be at before 10:30 AM. Even places like Harajuku that are traditionally wall-to-wall tourists were very navigable at that time, though by noon the crowds had really kicked in.

Also, it’s Japan. Even only getting a few hours a day was still a really good time. I ate a lot of tasty food, I bought some cool stuff to bring home, I got to practice my language skills. I’ve visited often enough that the novelty of places like Akihabara have really worn off, but I do love Tokyo. Something about the way that 37 million people in one of the densest places on the planet can more-or-less get along without dissolving into chaos makes me feel comfortable.

Plus I saw possibly the coolest thing I have seen yet, and I regret that there was no feasible way to walk into the dealership and say “crate one of those up and ship it to this address in America”

Yes, it’s a goddamn Hello Kitty Super Cub.

And of course the big positive was that it got me the rest of the credits I needed to keep my mileage status. Probably. I’m waiting on the credit from the ANA flight from Narita to San Francisco to kick in, but that only takes a couple of days.

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Two More Residents Evil Down.

Posted on November 29, 2025 by baudattitude

To continue from my last post on everyone’s favorite zombie fighting series, I can confirm that Resident Evil 5 WAS, in fact, a bit of a step down from Resident Evil 4. It’s not really an entirely fair comparison, of course, since the RE4 I played was the recent remake while RE5 was the Switch port of the original from 2009 which hasn’t gotten any quality of life updates and also LOOKS like an Xbox 360 game from 2009.

Well, not exactly. The Switch port runs at 1080P and thanks to an unlocked frame rate hits a smooth 60fps on the Switch 2. So it’s probably considerably better looking than the Xbox 360 version, but still…

While being a step down from RE4, it’s still a pretty fun game. I am more of a Leon fan than a Chris fan, but I enjoyed the banter between Chris and Sheva and the frequently over-the-top set pieces. I also found myself really enjoying the gyro aim that the Switch port brought to the table. I’m going to have problems adjusting to RE games without that in future.

I understand Sheva hasn’t shown up in the series since RE5, and that’s a bit of a shame. Hopefully the series makes another trip to Africa, it’s a really underutilized setting in games.

Downsides: It’s awfully brown. It’s really really brown. The sheer number of vaguely brown levels where you just shoot parasite-infested Africans got to me after a while, though the “suddenly, Tomb Raider!” levels helped make up for those.

Also, after the joy of playing suitcase Tetris in RE4, going back to a game with a drastically limited inventory was a bit of a shock, and needing to manage inventory for both Chris and Sheva was a considerable drag.

I followed RE5 up with… well, not RE6. Actually, I took a detour to 3DS land and gave Resident Evil : Revelations a go, and made it about four hours before I decided to do something else with my life. It’s not a bad game but the sheer amount of backtracking and the terribly dark and monotonous environments ship hallways just broke me after a while. I also stumbled across a thread talking about how the last boss was either a nightmare (if you couldn’t dodge) or easy (if you had mastered the dodge mechanic) and pondered the number of successful dodges I’d managed (like, three?) and that was also a contributing factor to dropping it.

Really impressive what they managed to cram into a 3DS game, though.

But after THAT I did move on to RE6. And it’s not brown. Like, well, there are brown levels but overall it does not FEEL brown in the same way that RE5 just felt brown. The game has some tragically low-resolution textures, but even with those it is so much prettier than its immediate predecessor.

Some of the levels made very limited sense, though. Like the whole medieval catacombs under a random American town thing. Very cool! But also very weird.

It’s also got Leon in it. AND Chris. Something for everyone! I even enjoyed the Jake campaign and of course more Ada is always welcome. Getting to play her campaign at the tail end of the other three was a great way to see all of the different stories tied together.

As an aside, I am certain that all of the crawling through ducts you do in the Ada campaign is vitally important to the plot and not just some guy at Capcom’s personal fetish in action.

It’s definitely the “Aliens” of the series, being much more action-horror than survival-horror, but I am putting it high in my personal rankings.

Normally I post screenshots of the various computers seen in these games and speculate what they were meant to represent, but neither RE5 nor RE6 had anything particularly interesting going on in that regard. Rather I will post a screenshot of some guy’s extremely nice winning mahjong hand. I’m sure that about five minutes after this guy laid these tiles down he was either (a) turned into a zombie or (b) eaten by zombies, but for those five minutes I bet he was awfully happy.

I think I’ll probably skip Revelations 2, so I’m left with only 7 and 8. At this point I will drop my entirely non-scientific ranking of the games I’ve played so far:

Resident Evil 4 (Remake)
Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
Resident Evil 6
Resident Evil 3 (Remake)
Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil (Remake)
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil 0
Resident Evil: Code Veronica

Posted in 3DS, Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

More adventures in Docker

Posted on November 15, 2025 by baudattitude

Not many homelab posts recently because I started a new job and it was really pretty rough for a bit there. I’m starting to feel like I’m getting my footing, but the first three months had me kinda regretting rejoining the work force. I’d get off work and just be like, I don’t want to do anything that involves learning.

But I’m feeling a little better now AND I repurposed an older Dell gaming laptop into a machine I could dedicate to homelab stuff by installing Omarchy on it. And I have been taking this to coffee shops just waiting to have my “I use arch, btw” moment but it has not arrived yet.

But what I have done is solved a problem that has been bugging me for some time and that turned out to be embarrassingly simple. Thought I’d share!

See, I have an unraid server that is intended to be a test server and not for production use, but I made the mistake of actually setting something useful up on it in the form of a Suwayomi instance, and now my wife uses it to keep track of all the manga/manhwa/manhua she reads on a daily basis.

I want to move this to a more stable server so I can’t accidentally break it, and in theory docker should make that easy, right? I already have the appdata directory pointed to a volume outside of the container’s virtual disk, I just need to move that over to the new server, spin up a new instance and boom it should just work right? The Suwayomi team even has a pre-baked docker-compose.yml file for you to use for this.

Well, I did that, and I confirmed that I could spin up an instance of Suwayomi and log into it and everything, and then I pointed it at the appdata folder I’d copied over from Unraid and well..

It did not go well.

So naturally I was like, is it permissions? Let’s see what happens if we run as root. OK, no, it’s not that. But it’s obviously a DB error. What DB does Suwayomi use even? How do I find that out?

It wasn’t the solution, but it turns out that Suwayomi uses a DB engine called “H2” which is literally a DB engine written in java that is designed to be embedded in your application so you don’t need to have an external DB server. I did not know this existed before today, but it seems pretty brilliant.

Anyway, I got stuck in a loop for a while. I’d point Suwayomi at the appdata from unraid, and it would break, and I’d point it back at the appdata created by Suwayomi if I just let it run and it would work again.

Eventually… EVENTUALLY I decided to log into unraid and see if I could figure out how it configures its docker images. I already knew it doesn’t use docker-compose files, but I didn’t know what it used.

Turns out they’re xml templates in /root/.docker/templates-user, as an aside.

And I opened the one called my-Tachidesk-Docker.xml and found this:

and then looked at my docker-compose.yml and saw

and swore a bit and changed it to:

…and then pointed the appdata folder for Suwayomi back to the folder from unraid. And it worked. Like, I’m not crazy enough to say it’s working flawlessly, but it seems to work and while I still need to test it a bit more I think it may have solved the problem. It just took several hours of not understanding what was broken, followed by adding seven letters to my docker-compose.yml to fix it entirely.

Also I’m not entirely clear on what the difference is between tachidesk and suwayomi-server. Until I looked at the screenshots just now I did not realize I was literally pulling from different repositories.

I’m also still a little confused as to why the unraid Docker image uses the “preview” build of Suwayomi instead of the latest release build. Personally that seems risky? But I am very risk-averse so maybe I’m just being a stick in the mud here.

Anyway, after I confirm this worked for Suwayomi I’m going to see what other containers I can migrate to their new stable home. Probably lose a little more of my sanity in the process. Should be a fun time.

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