Do not question my commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Posted on July 7, 2026 by baudattitude

OK, back to wholesome fare.  Fighting evil with the power of Sparkle.

No, really.

I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of picking up first party Nintendo releases whenever I go to Japan.  While I’m not a superfan of all of their series, they are pretty good about releasing games that are, for lack of a better word, actually finished at the time you buy them?  Like I don’t remember the last time Nintendo put something out and you had to download a day one patch.

Also they’re like forty bucks thanks to the exchange rate, which is much easier on the wallet than buying them in the US.

That’s how I came to own Princess Peach: Showtime, which I think is her second solo game.  The first one was way back on the Nintendo DS, I didn’t like it very much, I said as much in a post on this blog, and that post is one of only two I have ever taken down because it turns out that Nintendo superfans are, in fact, insane and it’s best not to provoke them.

I can talk about Showtime, because I did like it.

I don’t know if I would have liked it at sixty bucks, mind you.  It is a very short game, and very much on the easy side.  It’s very difficult to run out of health and the only effect of “dying” is that you lose a little money and get kicked back a screen or two.

Not that that’s a bad thing!  This is obviously aimed at kids.

Despite being short – only 35 levels, including five boss fights – you get a lot of variety in the game.  The gameplay hook is that Peach is performing in a bunch of different plays and changes roles for each one.  You get Peach-as-Swordsman, Peach-as-Detective,

…Peach as pastry chef.  I did not really care for the patisserie levels.  There’s no combat in them but there is some annoyingly strict timing involved in the baking mini games.

I quite liked Peach as Ninja and Peach as don’t-call-her-Ultraman.

It’s hard to tell from that screenshot, but one of the neat visual effects throughout the game is that you’re, well, part of a play.  So spaceships are held up by visible wires, enemies are puppets, backgrounds are all two-dimensional.  It’s really a clever style, though it’s hampered by some pretty low resolution graphics at times.  It seems to top out at 900p docked and doesn’t look great on even a moderately-large television.  Maybe there will be a Switch 2 patch to at least hit 1080P at some point.

In addition to defeating enemies with the power of Sparkle, there’s a lot of stuff to collect in every level and you will need to run through them multiple times if getting 100% completion is important to you.  I’m not that person.  I picked up the doohickies you need to spend to unlock boss fights whenever they were convenient and picked up as many coins as I could without getting too frantic about not missing one.

One of the weird things about collecting coins is that you mostly use them to buy dresses.  And there are a lot of dresses in the game.

The Kung Fu dress was one of my favorites.

BUT (big but) you are almost always playing a version of Peach who is not wearing a dress so you have like 20 or 30 dresses to choose from but you will only see them in the lobby when you are running between levels.

OK, and during boss fights.  You’re just plain old Peach for most of those, not Cowgirl Peach or Figure Skater Peach.

I kept expecting to be thrown into levels where I would switch between outfits on the fly, or even be made to choose what outfit to use, but this was asking a bit much of the game.  Every stage is tied to one outfit and you will use each outfit in exactly three levels.  This is bad (I would have liked a lot more time with Ninja Peach) but also good (thank heavens there were only three baking levels)

Anyway.  Good use of a couple evenings.  Much more wholesome than my last game.

 

 

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I’m still a degenerate, god damn it

Posted on July 6, 2026 by baudattitude

Occasionally, I like to read through recent posts to remind myself of what I’ve been up to.  The answer is usually “wasting my life away playing video games” but realistically I’m well into middle age and starting to think it should be “wasted”.

One thing I noticed during my most recent scrolling, however, is that most of the games I’ve played recently have been downright wholesome.  With the exception of a single screenshot of Ada Wong’s butt from last year, this blog has been entirely family friendly.

It has been FOREVER since I have played a game that could be described as “<popular thing>, but with boobs”

I think we know where this is going.

Enter Wedding Witch, which is Vampire Survivors but with boobs.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually played Vampire Survivors.  I’ve played a fair number of games that were reportedly inspired by it, but not the original.  They’ve all struck me as “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree”.  Which is fine, because Robotron:2084 is one of my favorite games of all time.  I have spent a lot of quarters trying to save the last human family.

So is Wedding Witch just “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree and boobs“?

Yeah, probably.

To be clear, there’s no actual nudity in the game.  It’s degenerate but not to the point where you couldn’t play a quick game on the living room TV with your parents visiting.  I mean, they’d probably be pretty disappointed in you.  But would they be any more disappointed than they already were?  If you’re the kind of person to buy Wedding Witch, probably not.  They’ve already given up.

What there is, then, is a paper-thin plot involving an (immortal? at least very long-lived) witch who was feared by all until she fell in love with a dude and they’re getting married but she has wedding jitters so she’s going to go beat up the local succubus and get a love potion.

The schtick of the game is that you go through 5-to-7 levels of mayhem, depending on difficulty setting, and then fight the succubus queen.  After every level, you get to pick from one of a few potions which have effects on the main character’s appearance.  Kemomomimi fan?  There’s a potion for that.  Like your girls tall, dark, and muscular?  Potion for that.  Devil horns?  Got you covered, bro.  There’s half a dozen of these, and they could be excused as just manifestations of the developer’s fetishes, but each one affects the game in ways that start getting weirdly deep for what could have just been an excuse to show some anime tiddy.

Think of it like selecting a character class.  Same sort of thing.  Except instead of saying “I’m going to take a level in Necromancer” you’re picking the “Put some devil horns on my waifu” option.

I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s talk about the actual game.

Like Robotron, every one of the levels has you surrounded by enemies coming at you from all sides.  Each game starts with a fairly mellow number of enemies on screen and rapidly ramps up to levels where there are hundreds of opponents and lots of spell effects going off and it becomes quite difficult to actually follow what’s happening at times.

In the second image, I’m somewhere in the middle of the purple stuff.

As alluded to previously:  Unlike Robotron, you get experience points from killing stuff and this lets you level up.  Every time you level up, you get to pick a skill.  There are some very basic skills, like ones that improve your melee range or that give your owl buddy an attack of his own, but there are a lot of skills that only become available after drinking certain potions.

For example: the Beast Potion, in addition to giving you fluffy ears and a tail, lets you summon familiars of various sorts to fight for you and gives you a lot of ways to buff familiars.  It also comes with movement speed skills that are not available to other classes.  The Demonic appearance potion gives buffs and skills related to curses, and so on.  So drinking a couple different kinds of potions is a good thing for variety.

You only get to choose from four buffs every time you level, though.  So if you chug a Beast Potion early on for movement speed, but want to focus heavily on Explosion magic for the later stages, you may wind up looking at a screen full of buffs for familiars trying to decide if any of them are useful for your current build.

For extra complexity, every level has a flower somewhere.

Because you’re a bride-to-be.

So you’re collecting flowers for a bouquet.

Which is also your primary melee weapon.

Look, I already told you the plot was not really the priority.

If you find this flower, you get the option of three different buffs, and some of them can be VERY unbalanced.  The difference between finishing a run versus dying in indignity can come from your flower buffs, so there is definitely a sense of anticipation (and occasional crushing disappointment) whenever you find a flower.

The game ends either when you get to the end of the map and beat up the succubus queen or when you die trying.  Each game isn’t very long, maybe half an hour or so, so the number of times I died weren’t too frustrating.  And, while your skills don’t carry over from one game to the next, you do earn money during the combat stages that you can use to buy permanent buffs to your character for the next play.

There are seven endings to chase – mostly they just differ in the character graphic shown at the end of the credits – and a whole lot of different skills to try out, so I definitely felt like I got my $2.99 (Summer sale price) worth from the game.  Oh, and it has a Mac version so there are no Crossover shenanigans required.  That’s the only way I found out about the game, actually – I was browsing Steam’s Mac storefront and it popped out at me.

After five hours with Wedding Witch, it really feels like the developer sat down and designed the whole combat system the skill tree and a bunch of different character classes and was feeling really smug about how everything worked together… and then they looked at the Steam storefront and wondered how on earth their indie game was going to catch any eyeballs in what is a downright deluge of quality indie games.

And they thought to themselves, “maybe if I put boobs in it?”

 

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Trophy chasing and Ubisoft generosity

Posted on July 4, 2026 by baudattitude

Following up my play through of the original Assassin’s Creed game a few weeks back by downloading the free expansion for Assassin’s Creed Mirage made perfect sense.  Basim may not have the charisma of an Ezio, Kassandra or Bayek, but he’s a generally pleasant character (unless you are currently being stabbed by him) and I really appreciated the streamlined back-to-basics nature of Mirage compared to some of the huge open world RPG titles that the series has become known for lately.

Seriously.  I tried playing Valhalla and got like 8 hours in and I still wasn’t an assassin yet.  I feel this should happen in the first two hours, three TOPS.

The DLC, “Valley of Memory” is also different because of the dynamic between Basim and his foster father.  I’m having some trouble thinking of ANY Assassin’s Creed game where the main character has a solid, positive relationship with his dad.  In fact, I can’t think of any other than III where the dad is alive.  And III is just a BIT of a special case.

It isn’t terribly long, and it kinda gave off the vibe of being sponsored by a tourism bureau, but one of my favorite things to do in any Assassin’s Creed game is to take a big camp full of enemies and treat it like a little puzzle to be solved.

With knives.

Valley of Memory has two really standout camps that scratched that itch good and hard, and a long sequence in a prison that hit almost all of the same notes, so I’m going to give it a solid thumbs up.

Oh, and it was free.  That helps.  Thanks, Ubisoft!

I had originally played through Mirage via Ubisoft Connect under Linux, so I was very happy to boot it up on a PS5 and found that it had imported my save.  That’s pretty new for Ubisoft, I think.  I know Valhalla DOES support this as well, but Odyssey does not so there’s a breakpoint right around 2020.

A side effect of this was that, while just the act of loading up my save and playing the game didn’t itself trigger any Playstation trophies, I kept hitting situations where I’d do something that would trigger like a half dozen to pop at the same time.  By the time I wrapped up Valley of Memory, I was sitting at like 70% trophy completion without even really trying…

…and then, because I’d been having a good time and because none of the remaining trophies felt TOO grind, I decided to keep playing.  For another three nights worth of stabbing mans and parkour and actually engaging with some of the systems I had ignored on my original run.

For the record?  If you are just starting Asssassin’s Creed Mirage DO NOT sleep on the smoke bombs.  I hadn’t bothered to use them at all until I suddenly had to chase a trophy involving throwing them at guards and they are basically God Mode for those situations where you get surrounded.

Anyway, end result:

This is my 23rd Platinum trophy.  I get one or two a year.  Usually they’re for games that fit three criteria:

First, I have to like the game a lot.  I think this goes without saying.

Second, the act of finishing the game’s main story should get you between 60% and 80% of all trophies.  Like, a platinum trophy should say “I liked this enough to keep going after the end credits” without being an expression of masochism.

I realize, having said this, that I have platinum trophies in Dark Souls, Nioh, Dark Souls II and Bloodborne.  And those are pretty masochistic games.

Third, if there are ANY multiplayer trophies they had better be very simple to get.  Like “I played a round with one stranger and I was done” levels of simple to get.  No “Fight Online 100 times” trophies.

Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, I am looking directly at you.  As an example.

If it was bankrolled in the interest of hyping up tourism in the Middle East, that failed.  I still have zero interest in visiting ANY of the locations that the game’s NPCs kept telling me I should really see before I die.  But as a game – ok, ok, an expansion for a game – I think it succeeded pretty nicely.

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Up in the Air, Junior Birdman

Posted on June 24, 2026 by baudattitude

We’re just coming out of Peak Videogame Hype Season, and of course I dutifully watched the States of Play and the Directs and the ..whatever the other things were.  There were a lot of neat trailers – I’m especially looking forward to Stellar Blade 2 – but the one I did NOT expect was the one for Ace Combat 8, at least partially because it reminded me that Ace Combat is a series of video games that exists.

I realize that is a harsh thing to say about a series that has, according to Wikipedia – and, on this, I believe we can probably trust Wikipedia – 14 games since 1995.  It’s got pedigree!

On the other hand, there has only been one entry in the series released in the last ten years, and somehow it wound up in my Steam library.  I think I bought it sometime after seeing Top Gun: Maverick, because who wouldn’t want to fly cool planes fast after that?

I also seem to own Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, but I think I bought that purely because you could dress up the planes in Idolmaster-themed skins and Steam says that my play time is in the 35 minute range.  It apparently did not stick with me.  Also it’s fairly universally considered to be a bad entry and not part of the mainline series so I’m not sure it will ever get past that 35 minutes.

Anyway.  Ace Combat 8.  It’s a thing that is coming later this year!  It looked cool!  It reminded me to play Ace Combat 7!

And, 20ish hours later, I’ve …saved the world?  Well, I’m not sure how much I saved the world.  But I shot down a bunch of planes and drones that were piloted by bad people or malevolent artificial intelligences and it ended on a hopeful note.  So let’s go with saved the world, to an extent.

I will say that the story ramps up pretty quickly from the introduction.  The introduction is pretty low stakes, but by the end of things you’re dealing with the effects of war on a global scale.

…not to say that there aren’t some comedic beats thrown in to ease the dramatic tension from time to time.

Couple of takeaways:

First, it is not afraid to kill you.  Even on easy.  I wound up dying a lot, often because I flew directly into other planes, or buildings, or occasionally the ground.

I didn’t get shot down often.  That’s probably where “easy” was saving me.  From other planes.  Nothing could save me from myself, though.

And when you die, you are taken back to the last checkpoint, which can be quite a while back.  This can get very old and I did find myself gripping the controller a little more tightly than strictly necessary a time or two.

It’s also not afraid to have very strict time limits on missions, and some of them I finished at the very last second, or to suddenly drop a new mission objective on you just when you think it’s time to fly into the sunset.

Basically, it was actually a challenge!  But, really, in a good way.  It wasn’t your Souls-style masocore you-will-fight-this-boss-until-you-git-gud sort of challenge, but rather a challenge where I needed to unravel each level as a puzzle box and figure out which planes and which special weapons would give me the best odds of success.

OK, most of the time I just flew the coolest-looking plane I’d unlocked.  But, you know, that’s a strategy of sorts.  Cool planes fly faster.  It is known.

It also throws a great curveball towards the end, where suddenly you get training wheels yanked away from you that you didn’t even know were training wheels.  I won’t spoil it but it was both mildly rage-inducing and also really neat.

Oh, and while there are Idolmaster themed emblems you can stick on your planes, they have two major issues. First, you can’t actually put cosmetics on your plane until you complete the campaign for the first time, which is I guess FINE for the sake of immersion, and second…

No Ritsuko.  Why is Best Girl always snubbed?

Also, did Assault Horizon have the same limitation on cosmetics in the campaign?  Maybe that’s why I didn’t play it very long if, all I wanted to do was play Pretty Princess Dress Up with fighter jets and it was not letting me.

I don’t play many games in this genre.  Actually, this may be the first one I’ve ever played to completion.  I did play a lot of Galactic Starfighter mode in Battlefront II, but I don’t think that really counts.  That’s purely multiplayer and you don’t really have the same sort of overarching story.

So, I guess I’m going to call this an Experiment in Trying Something New, and a successful one at that.  Not sure it’s translating into an Ace Combat 8 preorder, but… well, you know, eventually it will go on sale and I may take another spin through the Wild Blue Yonder.

Side note: I was traveling for part of the time I was playing through the campaign and I had my MacBook with me rather than my Linux laptop.  Can happily report that it plays brilliantly via Crossover, though it did drain my battery in a hurry when I tried to play it away from a wall outlet.

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Questionable Uses of my Spare Time

Posted on June 14, 2026 by baudattitude

A few years back, I saw a random forum thread recommending “Terminator: Resistance”, though admittedly “recommending” is probably an optimistic way to put it.  The basic thesis of the starting post was that it was admittedly a pretty mid game but one that you could find fun in if you were a fan of the franchise.

I’m not a HUGE Terminator fan, but I thought I probably fit the criteria.  So I promptly put it on a wishlist or two and forgot about it entirely.

Eventually, it got cheap enough to buy, it wound up in my Steam library, and then it sat there for about 10 months.

For me, this counts as actually playing a new game in a timely fashion.

Now that I’ve played it… yeah.  It’s pretty mid!  But apparently it got some balance patches after launch to polish out some of the rough spots, and got a PS5 remaster/upscale and overall rather more support than you’d expect to see if something was truly shovelware.  So taking seven years to jump on a 2019 game wasn’t an awful plan.

One of the things I always like to do in games is to take a close look at the environment.  Sometimes you find neat details that the artists put there even knowing that most players are just going to rush past them, and I use them as kind of shorthand to figure out how much budget a game had.  Like, the Call of Duty games load up their environments with all kinds of random unique objects, while Terminator Resistance has … a lot of boxes of maraschino cherries.

I can’t confirm that EVERY cardboard box in the game is full of maraschino cherries.  I did pass by a couple of NPCs at one point who were having a little side conversation where they were wondering where all of these cherries come from.

On the other hand, I Love-with-a-capital-L the notion that every random safe house has a Commodore Pet in it.  This makes no sense for a game based on the premise that Judgement Day took place on schedule in 1997, but seeing these is such a wonderful nostalgia hit.

We will ignore the weirdly inappropriate half height 5.25″ disk drive.  Like, why did you model it in there.

It’s also painfully gray.  Like, that kinda makes sense.   It’s set in the “Future War” universe that’s only seen in little flash forwards in the first couple of Terminator movies, and those scenes are really dark and gritty.

It’s so unremarkable that apparently I didn’t take any screenshots of the gray levels.  I did take one of this building, though.  Maybe it’s based on a real building in Los Angeles?  Dunno.  Most of the levels are ostensibly set in Pasadena or Downtown LA but the scenery seemed like pretty generic post apocalyptic city.

The somewhat oppressively-gray nature of most of the levels DOES make the level where you are outside in a forest in the daytime really pop, though.  You hit this point after a lot of slogging through gray and it is a really nice change.

Oh, that reminds me:  If you DO decide to play this game and have any way to play this in HDR I would strongly recommend that.  I happened to notice it was an option after a couple of hours of playtime and the world after turning it on was dramatically better looking than the world before turning it on.

Couple other nice touches that I wanted to mention:

First, the hacking game is NOT a pipe based game or one where you are trying to untangle wires.  Those are, like, the two basic hacking mini games and it was refreshing to see something new.  It’s basically Frogger, actually.  You have a little square that you need to move from left to right across lanes of traffic that are alternating direction and that move at different speeds.

Second, while every game in the last two decades has subscribed to the same “let’s scatter a bunch of random notes and recordings around the environment” system of world building, some of the ones in Terminator: Resistance are actually funny.

Howlongtobeat has Terminator: Resistance clocked at 9.5 hours.  I took more like 14 hours with it.  I shot a lot of chrome heads.  I did some stealth.  I leveled up a skill tree.  I hacked enemy turrets and giggled as they blew up their own dudes.  I upgraded weapons and did crafting.  I enjoyed seeing how it fit into the overall “Terminator” timeline, which is to say that it works really well with the timeline as described in the first and second movies, even if it doesn’t really add anything.

And I have made it through this entire article without mentioning even once that the game’s name is custom designed to give nightmare flashbacks to anyone who has ever tried to debug a SCSI daisy chain.

Well.  I almost did.

 

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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