Baud Attitude

Fun with History

Posted on June 6, 2026 by baudattitude

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Assassin’s Creed games.

I play most of them, though usually a couple of years after release. I kind of bounced off of Valhalla and I skipped Shadows, but I’m looking forward to Black Flag: Resynced. The gameplay is comfort-food stuff, and while I’m convinced Ubisoft has no idea what they want to do with the overall story they are usually very good at making protagonists I care about. I have an eternal soft spot for Ezio, and Bayak and Kassandra have been two of my favorite recent characters in gaming.

Side note: I say “recent” characters and then look at what I’ve written and google when Assassin’s Creed Origins came out and then I am reminded that getting older messes with your sense of time.

I don’t, usually, replay them. They’re pretty huge games. I did play the remastered version of Assassin’s Creed III because it was included with the copy of Odyssey I bought, and I liked it a lot more on the second go-around. I’ll do the same with Black Flag.

However. Way back when Microsoft announced that they were upscaling Xbox 360 games when played on newer systems, one of their flagship upscales was the original Assassin’s Creed, from 2007. So checking that out has been on my to-do list since uh.

2017.

Look. I’m slow to get around to things.

But I did get around to it! I started it in mid-May and finally rolled credits last night. And, boy, this is one of those times I really wish I knew more about the game they planned to make because it’s pretty clear that their ambitions were drastically different from the game that got put on the disc. I didn’t notice this stuff when I played it originally, but after a couple decades of pulling virtual worlds apart it’s a lot more apparent.

Let’s back up. One of the things that immediately hits you when you start running around the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th century is that it’s huge but also surprisingly empty. There is a lot of world here, and a lot of people in it… but there are big chunks with not much to do except look for collectibles and run away from guards.

Also until you start googling things like “Who ruled Acre in the 12th Century” you never learn that it’s the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It’s just called “The Kingdom” in-game. I suspect that Ubisoft did not want to upset anyone.

Also while I had vaguely heard of the Crusades I didn’t know that they were actually successful in establishing a Christian state in the middle east that lasted for over a century. I will blame the American public school system for that gap in my knowledge.

Anyway. That aside, it’s a big world and quite a feat to pull off on the consoles of the time. Running around the cities, when you actually get into a good flow of parkouring from one building to the next, is fun. Altair’s habit of throwing himself into water and dying instantly can be just a TINY bit of a mood kill, of course.

Looking back at my notes from originally playing the game, it apparently crashed a lot on my PS3 and I had to replay segments frequently. So if I put up with that, logically I must have been having a good time.

Also, I described it as “buggier than a farmhouse porch light on a summer evening” and I am in love with that turn of phrase. Like, I want to meet the guy who wrote that because he is a MUCH better writer than I am today.

When I played it again, even without crashes, I had less of a good time. You start to notice all the things Altair can’t do that were added in later games. Ledge assassinations. Smoke bombs and other gadgets. Proper air assassinations. Bribing beggars to go away instead of putting up with having two or three of them following you around getting between you and the guy you actually want to stab. That kind of thing.

You also start to feel like the designers started off to make a sort of hard core stealth game and then got told to make it mass market friendly. Like, for a couple of the assassinations I actually took time to scout out the area and figure out where guards and archers were and then went sneaky sneaky up to the guy I wanted to stab before going pokey pokey.

Felt very Assassincore.

For most of them I just pulled out the old nine iron and started swinging and eventually one of the dozen dudes around me would fall over and I’d get a cutscene telling me that I’d stabbed the correct dude.

This is a good thing, too, because it got me used to being surrounded by like a dozen dudes and surviving fights against a dozen dudes and the last couple levels of the game have several bits where you are locked in arenas with like a dozen dudes at a time and no options to escape other than to be the last dude standing. If I had been Sooper Sneky Guy for the entire campaign these segments would probably have been pretty painful.

The whole framework around these individual assassinations also seems like it was designed for the hardcore stealth game they wanted to make and then revamped. You can’t just roll into Jerusalem and merk the dude what you were sent to mark. You have to do a bunch of intel gathering first. Some of it is pretty fun, like pickpocketing maps or eavesdropping on careless guard chatter.

Some of it is less fun. Like when you run into a dude with totes important info but he won’t give it to you unless you make with the perforating kidney thing on a bunch of dudes that like to hang out directly in front of very observant guards. And you kill all the dudes without getting noticed and you’re going back to the informant dude but you bump into a chick who’s holding a clay pot and it drops and breaks and this alerts every guard in the city to your presence and you fail the mission and need to start all over but because you stabbed the dudes their bodies are still on the ground even though they are also walking around and the guards see the bodies and get even more paranoid and eventually you just quit the game and reload so the bodies are cleared up and you can have a chance at completing the mission.

ahem.

I may have gone a little wild there. Let me rephrase. “There are some unexpected difficulty spikes in certain side missions”

And to be fair, you can pick and choose the intel missions to take. There are, essentially, nine dudes you need to stab and every one of them has six intel missions associated and you only need to finish three before unlocking the assassination. I think one or two of the early dudes only need you to complete two intel missions? I wasn’t keeping careful track.

Point is, if you hate a particular mission type you can skip it. I didn’t do this for most of the game. I tried to finish every intel mission AND help every citizen that was being accosted by thugs AND unlock every viewpoint and this made it quite a grind. I do not recommend this, though it did mean that I went into the later levels of the game with a maxed-out health bar. Which I DO recommend. So maybe doing some of the grindy side content was a good idea. Just, maybe in moderation.

Looking at the metacritic scores from back in the day, Assassin’s Creed scored an 81 overall. I think that was a bit generous, but that’s from a modern perspective. I’m glad that I went through it again because it was fascinating to see where the series started and because modern open world games seem to owe a massive debt to concepts that either came out of Assassin’s Creed or were at least popularized by it. It’s a history lesson both in terms of world history and in the context of game design.

Just don’t think I’ll do it again.

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

Today I met the Cell Whisperer.

Posted on May 29, 2026 by baudattitude

One of my favorite gags in media is where the unassuming looking guy that people either make fun of or ignore turns out to be a Secret Master of some art.

Today I finally met one.

Some backstory: A few months ago, I needed to update the credit card for my ~~Comcast~~ Xfinity account. I couldn’t do it on their website because their website is painfully slow on a good day and on the particular day I was trying to update it the website would just throw timeout errors when trying to load my account info.

So I called Xfinity customer support, and a polite gentleman helped me update my payment info. And then he launched into a sales pitch about how wouldn’t I like to get my internet bill cut in half and by the way he could send me a free iPad and… honestly it just kind of washed over me. It was painfully apparent that he was selling me something and that his sales tactic was to talk so fast that his victim didn’t have time to think.

But, he had been incredibly helpful and, frankly, charming so I figured I would help him hit whatever metric his bosses were trying to have him hit and then go to their retail store and figure out what I’d been sold.

So I said yes to everything he offered me and we ended the call. A few days later, an iPad arrived and I trotted over to Xfinity to ask what the catch was.

It turned out that the catch was that I’d gotten the iPad for half price and I was now paying 20 bucks a month for mobile data and like six bucks monthly for the iPad on an installment plan. Still this was cheaper than my cable internet bill had been before, and I was honestly kind of curious how useful a cellular iPad might be so I kept it and I kept the mobile data. The guy at the Xfinity store seemed legitimately surprised that I didn’t blow up and ask for a refund, but… well, I had to give the phone support guy credit for being nice and helpful BEFORE the hustle ensued.

It also turned out that a cellular iPad is VERY handy. Like, you think “well there’s WiFi everywhere” or “I can just tether off my phone” and then you actually use a device where you just unlock it and you immediately have data without needing to deal with a captive portal or with turning on tethering.

So when I bought a new iPad a couple of weeks ago, trying to get ahead of potential price increases due to the ongoing rampocalypse, I went for the cellular model.

But, it needed a cellular plan to work, and with some LLM-assisted searches I eventually discovered that this wasn’t a problem – I could just switch my existing data plan to my new iPad using a self-service tool on the Xfinity website.

I could not find this tool. See above comments about Xfinity’s website being awful. What I DID see was a banner ad for some sort of plan that let me use a combination of up to 10 tablets and watches for $35. This seemed like a good deal, and I tried to sign up for it… only to be completely stymied because every time I clicked on the banner ad I got taken to a page with no apparent way to add the plan.

So it was off to another Xfinity retail store, where after an hour’s wait (pro tip: make an appointment) I was handed off to a representative who pulled out a piece of paper, wrote “$35” on it and then “2 x 12.50 + 5 x 0” and told me this would be the cost. When prompted for elaboration, he informed me that this was the monthly cost of two tablets and five watches for my new data plan. Apparently watches are free? And I needed five of them? And whatever these tablets are (iPads? Samsungs?) I needed two more of those.

I protested, and asked to simply buy the plan. This led to being given a variety of versions of “you can’t have this plan unless you buy more hardware today” and being told that I wasn’t listening and didn’t understand how these things worked.

He scribbled different numbers on his paper. It felt like the thing car dealers do when they are trying to get you to think about the price of a car as a monthly thing and not a total.

I do not like car dealers. I did not like this guy.

I would like to say that eventually I politely deferred and left. In honesty I will admit that I was less polite than I liked and told him, as he wasn’t interested in selling me what I wanted to buy I would be leaving. On the way out I asked the reception desk to make sure that I got a survey.

That was a corporate Xfinity store. I did not have much hope for the “affiliate” stores, but barring other options I drove over to the next one, where I was assigned a helper after a much shorter wait. He was on the younger side (late 20s? Maybe early 30s?) so I had hopes that he would be a little more tech-savvy.

It turned out that he was familiar with the plan, and asked me if I wanted to buy a tablet or “bring my own” and critically DID NOT push me to buy a tablet. He commented on my iPhone’s case having a retro Mac vibe. He reminisced about trying to play the Oregon Trail game on his grandmother’s Zenith PC.

I was liking this guy.

Once he had the gist of what I wanted, he did some things on his tablet. It sent me text messages asking me to confirm things. He scanned my ID. I signed things. Eventually my iPad lit up with a new cellular plan. It was lovely. But it was not the surprise.

This was the surprise.

After we had the iPad online, I asked if I could add a device to the plan even if it didn’t have an eSIM, and he said that, yes, I could… but it would depend on the bands that the device supported. This was a familiar concept to me, to a point – I’d run into this when trying to use a US cell phone in Japan. I mentioned this as sort of an aside, an “yes I’m familiar with the concept” so I didn’t sound like I was completely clueless.

What followed was amazing. I got a rundown of transmission frequencies used in the US, and those used in Japan, and where the overlaps were. I got, in what I believe was an extremely abbreviated fashion, a history of the changes from the GSM/CDMA days and the way that the different carriers had leveraged their legacy infrastructure when implementing modern standards. I was given a flood of information and did my best to stay afloat.

It was breathtaking. It was being in the presence of someone who Knew His Stuff and had finally found someone who would listen to it. I genuinely just wanted to take all of the wisdom from his brain and cram it into mine.

I do not know what he is doing peddling mobile plans in an affiliate-branded Xfinity store in a random Oregon strip mall. I do not know what confluence of coincidences brought me to him. But I got my iPad its data plan, and I left the store, and I spend several minutes in a state of wondering if I was really awake or if I had just dreamed the encounter.

Posted in gadgets, ipad | Leave a comment

Console Peasantry Continues

Posted on May 28, 2026 by baudattitude

OK, so.

Astro Bot on the PS5 was incredibly pretty, and I’ve been putting in a bunch of hours in Genshin, and I loaded up Stellar Blade because I wanted a HDR showcase and that game has a lot of shiny… objects on screen.

And then I thought, gosh. Back when the generation was just getting underway, in the heady days of 2020, I was really bullish on the Series X. By 2024 I was absolutely disenchanted with it, mind you, but I remember being really excited about Microsoft’s Big Black Monolith way back when. I’m certainly not going to buy another one, but what would happen if I cracked open an Xbox One X and swapped out the horribly slow HDD for a 1 TB SSD that happened to be lying around?

And having done that, I am reminded how much this console felt like The Future when it came out roughly 9 years ago. I have been playing the original Assassin’s Creed, and the 4K upscale Microsoft managed to apply to this thing makes it look like a whole new game (well, assuming you can ignore some jaggy UI elements)

I’m also finding out that I really don’t notice 30fps games, which was a surprise. Or, well, maybe I notice them but it doesn’t take me too long to stop noticing. I thought I would be more sensitive, honestly.

One thing I DID notice turned out to be more than a little sobering.

After downloading Assassin’s Creed, I popped open my games library and went to the “Full Library” tab, which showed me that I owned 270 games.

And, on a lark, I filtered this down to only games that would play on the Series S or X.

It was two games. TWO.

I am forced to realize that I owned a Series X for four years – FOUR YEARS – and in that entire time I played almost nothing on it that couldn’t have been run on an Xbox One X.

At least it was a pretty monolith?

Posted in videogames, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | Leave a comment

What a difference 18 months makes. (Or, why I’m a filthy console peasant again)

Posted on May 23, 2026 by baudattitude

So. Back in the fall of 2024 I boxed up my XBOX Series X and my PS5 and took them over to the local Gamestop and took the (fairly generous) trade-in credit they offered in return. And it felt pretty good! There were fewer plastic boxes under the television set, and life felt generally simpler. At the time, it felt like even the most console-centric developers were coming around to the Gospel of Gaben and PC gaming meant more frames and prettier ones, with very little of the tinkering from days past required.

And, for a time, that seemed like it was going to be true. With the exception of HDR. Which is, frankly, a pain in the neck on the PC – both because it seems extremely inconsistent in terms of quality and because just getting basic screenshots turns into your choice of “washed-out flashbang” or “dark-as-midnight-on-a-moonless-night” and even the right screenshot key to press might differ depending on whether you’re playing a game that is natively HDR or that is only HDR because Windows is forcing their auto-HDR on.

So I turned off HDR. And life was better. It was a small compromise.

And PC gaming was great. I got through a ton of backlogged games, and I even managed to finally gel with the Resident Evil series after 30-ish years of never getting very far into any of them.

I even played some modern AAA games with Mac ports! Things were crazy!

Then I started hitting some more recent games. Games that weren’t built around the limitations of the Xbox One or PS4, that had modern expectations for hardware, that used various kinds of AI upscaling to hit their resolution targets, that might have ray tracing (but only if you had the right kind of GPU)… In short, games where I couldn’t just launch them and whip all the settings to the “Highest” settings and start. I started launching games and spending a couple of hours dinking around in the settings menu instead of going directly to Press Start to Play.

For full disclosure, this is also about when I switched to playing games on Linux. Which did add its own level of pain to the whole thing. Steam games generally worked just fine, at least. As long as you didn’t want HDR. Well, you COULD get HDR working. But you needed to use a different Proton version. Also things like Resident Evil Requiem had flawless support for DualSense controllers under Windows but just didn’t even see them on Linux. So that extra bit of complexity is 100% on me.

Then I bought Pragmata. Which is an AMAZING game. Cannot speak highly enough of it. But I got spoiled by people telling me how much I Needed To Turn Path Tracing On. But that is only supported in Nvidia cards, and only in Windows, so I had to switch back to Windows and …well, yeah. It looked really good.

But.

I wanted to hit a reasonable frame rate, with path tracing on. Which my 4070ti Super couldn’t do at 1440p native. So I needed to experiment with AI upscaling. Or I could use frame generation… but I couldn’t run frame generation AND cap my frame rate output, so my computer would go into Jet Fan Cooling Mode.

There’s a very early hallway in Pragmata. It’s a hallway you walk down just after you leave the shelter for the first time. You fight about five robots in it, and there’s a bit where you can look to your side and you see the reflection of Hugh carrying Diana. If you don’t have ray tracing on, you only see Hugh. If you have regular ray tracing on, you can see Diana but she’s just kind of a blue blob. If you have path tracing on, you can tell she actually has hair. TRANSFORMATIVE.

I walked down this hallway so many times trying to dial in Just The Right Settings, not actually playing the game. It was ridiculous.

I did eventually stop dinking around in the settings and just played the game. It was incredible. Strongly recommend playing it whatever hardware you have at hand.

And then, like I mentioned, I bought a PS5 in order to get out ahead of Sony’s price increase.

And because I had a PS5, well, might as well check out a PS5 game from the local library. Which you can do with PS5 games because they still come on discs.

So, I checked out Astro Bot.

I don’t know if it HAS a settings menu. I don’t know if it was using AI image upscaling, or frame generation, or what the LOD or DOF settings are. Was it using subsurface scattering for improved skin tones? I DO NOT KNOW.

I just put a disc in. Waited for a few minutes for it to install. And then played the game.

And then I considered how many hours I’d spent Not Playing Pragmata. And I thought about how many hours I had in the evening after work (it’s not many).

And I think I will be buying new releases on the PS5 from now on.

I’m not 100% a filthy console peasant. I have a Bazzite box under the TV which I’m also working towards making a Sunshine box for remote play over Tailscale. Because making things complicated is my idea of a good time, I guess. I’ll try not to let that project eat too much of my evenings.

Posted in PC Gaming, PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

In which, I buy a console and fall down the rabbit hole.

Posted on April 21, 2026 by baudattitude

So for about a year and a half, I didn’t own any modern consoles. Well, barring the Switch and later the Switch 2, but I think we can sorta hand wave Nintendo away as being its own thing.

And the mostly-console-free life wasn’t bad! Most games are available in versions for personal computers, and older games that were console-only can often be played through emulation.

But, Sony recently announced that they were hiking the prices on all of their consoles and I looked at the few reasons I might have to ever own a modern console again (Bloodborne, Gravity Rush, a handful of games I own on PS5 and don’t want to re-buy) and I reluctantly jumped on a PS5 before the price hikes could take effect.

Not a Pro, mind you. I looked at the $750-and-it-doesn’t-come-with-a-drive price and laughed.

Besides having access to a few console exclusives and being able to check PS5 games out of our local library and avoid paying for them, it’s also nice for Genshin and I play a lot of Genshin. You get the nice clouds and the nice textures and a bunch of other graphical tweaks that never made it to PC.

There are also a few cases where the PC port of a game is still lacking even if the console hardware is objectively weaker. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a good example of this – you can get the graphics on the PC to look virtually the same as the console, or even better, but the PC version suffers from some egregious asset pop-in that is very distracting. At least, it is to me. The console version plays much more smoothly in my experience, even if the recent “60fps” patch is more of a “eh, 50ish fps” patch on the PS5.

Anyway. That’s some flimsy justifications for spending like five hundred bucks on a PS5. But I had the money, I spent the money, now I have a PS5.

And then I fell down a rabbit hole of, even for me, epic proportions.

See, I got the PS5 home, and I set it up, and I loaded a few games on it and I played them for the four or five hours that it takes for the DualSense to go dead, and then I plugged in my brand new controller to charge.

Then it got very very hot and refused to charge and refused to turn on and there was juuuuuust a hint of “burned electronics” smell.

I considered taking the whole thing back to Walmart, but I’d spent so long loading games onto it that I decided to try out Sony’s warranty service instead – and, to their credit, they are very good. I opened the warranty ticket, got a FedEx label emailed to me the next day, mailed off the broken controller and got a replacement inside of a week. Different serial numbers, too, so they just dropped a new one in a box for me.

Issue solved! But it got me thinking.

See, even though I’d sold my old PS5 a couple years back, I’d held on to a DualSense for use with my iPad and with my CachyOS system. But it’s a little bit of a pain to charge when you’re not plugging it into a console – in fact, it completely refuses to charge from some chargers. Won’t even light up. More annoyingly, if you play a long time with it plugged into a PC, the battery will die even though it should be charging off the PC. I couldn’t figure it out.

So when I got back the one that had burned up while charging, I collected a bunch of various chargers and cables from around the house and started plugging things into other things. I also took advantage of the fact that my MacBook will report the output wattage of a USB-C charger plugged into it to try to map out which chargers delivered how much power and under which circumstances.

The short version of all of this is that I eventually discovered that DualSenses are kinda picky about the power input they take and chargers that try to support the proprietary charging standards that Samsung etc use can confuse it. The best case outcome here is that they won’t charge, but the worst case is that they can confuse it to the point of drawing way more power than it can handle.

This isn’t what killed the controller in my particular case, mind you. It managed to self-immolate when plugged into my new PS5. I have since charged it and other controllers from the same PS5 without incident so presumably it was a fault with the controller and not the PS5.

Anyway. That wasn’t really the short version. The short version is that I can’t reliably get a DualSense to charge from any of my fancy multi-port Ugreen or Anker chargers. It charges just fine when plugged directly into the PS5, it will charge if plugged into the USB-C port of my iPad, it will also charge without complaint when plugged into an Apple 20W charger.

(I looked up Apple chargers after discovering this. It turns out that they have support for very few charging standards, meaning that they don’t confuse the PS5 controller. Basically they’re dumb enough for it to handle.)

Happily, I have a bunch of Apple 20W chargers around. So for anything that just needs 20W or less and isn’t proprietary they may be the best solution.

I also spent way longer than I’d like to admit looking at USB-C cables and mostly throwing my hands up in frustration. I tossed a few that were obviously very cheaply-made but I have a bunch of cables from Anker and Ikea and Ugreen that are probably decent quality but I would need a specialized USB-C cable tester to be certain and the price is, charitably, prohibitive. Suffice it to say, USB-C is a headache.

Edit: Less than 24 hours later I have been made aware that there are sub-$50 USB-C cable testers available. For that price I will take the plunge.

I know I am not the first person to come to this realization. And it’s better than the previous alternatives. But like, I know I have a single USB-C cable that can do 240W power. I know which one it is, because it’s the only white 2-meter cable I have with a silicone sheath. But nothing on the cable itself tells me that and I am left wondering why they can’t just print this sort of stuff on the cable? Like, if I pick up an ethernet cable there is a 90% chance I can glance at it and know, hey, this is cat5e. USB-C I have to remember.

There was also the like 90 minutes where I hunted down every USB hub and dock we own and made a spreadsheet out of them. Looks like this:

I cropped it here because the list was frankly embarrassing.

Posted in gadgets, PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

In which, I give another Nintendo Mascot a try.

Posted on April 18, 2026 by baudattitude

OK. Technically I have played Donkey Kong games before. To be very precise, I have played Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, and Donkey Kong 3.

Donkey King 3 was released to arcades 43 years ago.

I understand there have been one or two since then. First, during the years when Nintendo was keeping a 16-bit system afloat while the world moved to bigger and better things and then continuing through their subsequent systems. They even keep getting remastered and re-released, so the character must have some fans.

I’ve never really been tempted to get caught up with the Kong mythos. Truth be told, I can’t get over the instinctive revulsion I have to the character. He’s ugly as heck, his supporting cast of smaller monkeys are even uglier, and his character traits are “dumb but strong” with a strong side order of “thinks with his stomach”.

Not exactly a looker, and you can make him even more unappealing by buying alternate fur colors to turn him into a purple gorilla or something cotton-candy themed:

He gets even worse when you start getting various transformations to turn him into bizarre hybrids of gorillas and other animals.

It is possible that I am not being fair and that the character just isn’t for me.

However, pickings for native Switch 2 games have been pretty slim so far – especially compared to the launch year of the original Switch. Most of what I’ve used my Switch 2 for has been playing Switch games that take advantage of the dramatically improved performance of the new system.

That’s a pretty poor use of money, all things considered.

So, when I was in Japan a few months ago I took advantage of the exchange rate to buy Bananza. And quite a few other games, yes, but Bananza had the reputation for being the real showcase game for the Switch 2 in 2025 so it was high on my list to get to.

And it is, ignoring the grotesque main character, a genuinely pretty game. You can tell that Nintendo’s developers really enjoyed having the new hardware to play with, and the level designers got pretty imaginative with the sorts of levels they could build. Sure, you have the requisite ice level and the requisite magma level, but you also get stuff like a level themed entirely around a giant burger.

I will admit, though, that bashing my way through the burger was enough to turn a lesser person vegetarian. They really managed to make the meat textures look very… meaty.

Oh. Right. Bashing through. I didn’t know much – really, I didn’t know anything about the game before going into it so I wasn’t expecting the degree to which you can more or less tunnel through all of the terrain. You’ll occasionally get blocked by unbreakable walls or terrain like lava or thorns that will kill you, but otherwise you’re free to strip mine the very pretty environments for a seemingly endless variety of collectibles.

I’m told that the game is full of fun cameos and in-jokes for fans. Not knowing anything about what the Kongs have been up to for the last forty-odd years, they pretty much all just flew over my head. I did at least recognize that some of the characters had shown up in other games, even if I personally only knew them from Smash Brothers.

And, hey – now I know that at least one of the characters in Smash Brothers that I didn’t know the origins of was a Donkey Kong supporting character. So that was educational.

In the end, I took about 20 hours to roll credits, and the last third of that was really very good. Once you get all of the various transformations and have unlocked your skill tree a bit, the game really starts throwing some inventive challenges at you.

There’s some post game stuff but it’s locked behind collecting up to 600 of the game’s 777 bananas. By the end of my time with Bananza, I had gathered a whopping 215, and I felt I was done.

DK:B was the only game I’ve actually managed to see the end of in since wrapping up Resident Evil 9 back on March 2nd. I’m going to blame that on playing two “service games” (World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact) which eat a lot of my gaming time. At least I’ve managed to more or less put Blue Archive and Nikke down for the time being – when I was trying to play three mobile games at the same time it was pretty challenging to keep on top of all of them.

Next up? I dunno. Pragmata maybe? Capcom has been on my good list lately. But then there’s also the Fatal Frame II remake, and I stumbled across a good deal on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and I like me a good Soulslike…

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

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 | 1 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.