“My 9 Games” and what they say

Posted on August 23, 2026 by baudattitude

Stumbled across an interesting site today, “My 9 Games”, which is a site where you go and choose the 9 most influential video games in your life.  I’d seen the output from it on X a bunch of times but hadn’t ever clicked through to find out that I could set my own up before.

This isn’t intended to be a list of your 9 favorites, but rather ones that affected you most, so mine skews a little old.  These aren’t in any particular order.

Let’s break it down!

Everquest (1999): This is probably third most influential if I had to pick an order.  Actually if we look at the top three we should probably read it right to left.

You know, I’m just not going to order these at all.

Anyway.  I don’t want to think about the number of hours I sank into Everquest, and then World of Warcraft, Everquest II, TERA, Final Fantasy XIV, Rift, Dark age of Camelot, Lord of the Rings Online… but I do have fond memories of the people I met in them.

The fact that this is still online and still getting new content drops 27 years later says a lot about it as well.  While I’ve moved away from it, there are a lot of people who still love its take on the MMO treadmill.

Ms. Pac-Man (1982): As a young lad, I was consumed by Pac-Man Fever… and then I moved to a small town with no Pac-Man machine but that did have a Ms. Pac-Man machine, and at first I didn’t want to play it because you had to play as a girl.  I got over that, though it did take a while, and soon realized that it was much more fun than the Mr. version.  Call it a very young and very small step towards being a slightly better person.

Shining Force (1992): This wasn’t exactly my first JRPG, but it is the one that made me actually start to like the genre.  More importantly, this (maybe Shining Force II?) was the first game that I played together with my now-wife, and after three decades of genuinely good times together I think this one can’t be beaten as most influential.

Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai Special (1995): I think anyone who spends a few minutes going through the archives here will realize that I am a generally decent person but also a little bit of a degenerate, and this game probably started me down that path AND forced me to learn mahjong.

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991): My family never owned any of the Atari/Coleco/Mattel consoles when I was very young, and the first things I owned that could play games were all computers – a Vic 20, Atari 130XE and a hand-scrabbled-together PC XT clone.  I knew that the NES existed but considered it a pretty shallow thing and saw no reason to buy a console when computer games existed.

Seeing Sonic playing on a TV at the local Software, Etc absolutely broke me of that and I have owned just about everything with a gamepad and/or a screen since.

Doom II (1994):  Oddly, not the original Doom.  I didn’t feel comfortable sending money away to iD for the rest of the game back when it was distributed as Shareware, but Doom II could be bought in a store.  Also I was working a boring midnight to 8 shift at work with very little work to do and no oversight so I spent hours and hours of my employer’s time blasting through this.

Dark Souls (2011): Technically I would not have tried this without having played Demon’s Souls, but while I liked that to a surprising extent, this was the game that taught me a lot about patience and getting satisfaction out of doing something that I hadn’t considered possible.

It also made me realize that labeling something as too hard for myself without even trying it was a horrible habit to have and a trap that I was very prone to falling in to.

Genshin Impact (2020): “Wait, this is a phone game? Well, I’ll play it but I don’t expect much” and six years later I’m eagerly anticipating every story drop and logging in for at least a few minutes daily to get the drip feed of resources and keep building out my army of virtual waifus.

I like it when numbers go up and having like 70 characters who all need levels and equipment and skills and friendship means that there are always numbers to go up.

We will not discuss my lifetime spend on this as we are all friends here, but it’s probably more than I should have spent while also not excessive when you look at it on a per-hour-played basis.

Finally, Skyrim (2011).  It’s a very normie game and also ridiculously popular, which is the point.  It made me break out of a kind of hipster attitude and accept that some things that are popular are popular because they are good.  This, Dark Souls, and Ms. Pac-Man are all games that are on this list because they made me examine myself and realize that I needed to change.

Look, some people read self-help books.  Whatever works for you.

It’s also one of those games that is basically a template for modern open world games, and I think that so many new games are modeled after it that you’re doing yourself a disservice trying to get into them without trying Skyrim first.  Kind of like the way that 25 years after Halo launched with the original Xbox you can still pick up the vast majority of first-person shooters and your Halo muscle memory will get you through the basic controls, trying to play through the Skyrim main story and winding up getting distracted by a million side quests will prepare you for an innumerable number of newer titles.

Anyway, that’s my “nine”, and if you want the chance to think about this for yourself you can find the site here.

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

Talking to a Raspberry Pi 3B Over Serial For Fun and… Profit?

Posted on August 21, 2026 by baudattitude

It has only taken me 19 years, 5 months, and 18 days since creating a blog titled “Baud Attitude” before I finally wrote something that justified the horrible pun contained therein.

For anyone that did not come of nerd age during the years of the BBS, “baud” is a measurement of speed in serial communications, so the higher the baud rate your modem could handle the faster your connection was.  Technically “baud” isn’t correct for any speed above 300 baud, but nobody ever cared about the distinction unless you were a crazy pedant.

For the sake of decency, we will not explore the question of whether I personally am one of these crazy pedants.

I think we all know the answer to that one.

Moving on!  Some weeks ago, one of the people I follow on X because they post nerdy things posted a question of what they could do with a Raspberry Pi that wasn’t displaying any image when connected to a monitor, and I asked whether they could connect to it over a serial port.  See, way back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth, a “terminal” wasn’t a program you ran on your computer.  A “terminal” was a piece of hardware that contained a keyboard and monitor and no local processing power of its own.  You connected a terminal to a serial port on a Unix system or other computer and interacted with the computer that way.

I used to own a couple of terminals.  It’s been a very long time.  I was looking for pictures of one online, but when I started googling “Wyse amber crt terminals” I started being hit with massive waves of nostalgia and an urge to start projects I should not start.  So, I will not post a picture.  Just imagine an old CRT monitor with a clunky beige keyboard in front of it.

This suggestion was not useful.  In fact, it was met with a certain degree of confusion because it turns out that nobody under a certain age has ever connected anything to a serial port.  So I apologized and moved on.  I don’t know whether he ever did get his Pi working again.

BUT IT GOT ME THINKING.

It turns out that the Raspberry Pi does have a serial port hidden in the GPIO pins, and I found a couple of pages (page1) (page2) talking about how to set up a connection and a $10 cable on the Adafruit website that was a USB-to-Serial cable designed for this specific task.

With shipping it was closer to $17, but I will forgive them that.  Technically I could have put more stuff into my cart to qualify for free shipping, but can we talk for a moment about how dangerous that site is to browse?

The cable arrived this week, and it’s something of a personal record that it only took me two days before I took it out of the mailer, plugged it in, and set about trying to make things work.

This isn’t a super involved process.  You need a network connection to the Raspberry Pi (or you can edit a config file on the SD card directly, but this didn’t work for me), you need a power supply for the Raspberry Pi (Here provided via a USB-C-to-Micro-B cable to my laptop) and you need the Adafruit cable.  You also need terminal emulation software on whatever computer you will be using to make the connection, and while it wasn’t installed by default for me, a simple

pacman -Syu && pacman -S screen

was all I needed to get it installed.

To enable terminal emulation on the Pi, I strongly recommend just sshing into the Pi, running raspi-config and enabling the Serial Port under “Interface Options”.  You’re supposed to be able to edit a file under /boot but even after doing so I could not make it work.

Once I sorted this out and rebooted the Pi, I was greeted with a glorious sight:

OK, probably not super glorious.  But it was a success!

I did have some twitchiness working with the Pi over serial to start with.  It seemed to drop a lot of the characters I was typing.  Initially I blamed this on the power from the laptop not being enough for the Pi, but then I fiddled with the connections to the GPIO pins and the problem went away.  So I think I hadn’t pushed the connectors in far enough.

It’s wild to me, by the way, that the connection to the Pi is at 115200 baud with NO HARDWARE HANDSHAKING.  Like, back in the Long-Ago Times it was understood that you could not reliably work over 2400 baud without RTS/CTS handshaking on the serial line.

There was only one remaining annoyance, which was that the official Raspberry Pi case does not allow GPIO access with the case closed.

So it was off to Makerworld for a very simple case to solve the issue and then just a matter of waiting an hour for my A1 to stop making noise and smells.

I used orange because (a) I had a lot of orange filament remaining on a 1 kg spool I bought a few months ago and haven’t had many uses for and (b) I think a bright orange case on a gadget makes it look cool and especially hacky.

It came out pretty well, though it’s a little less clean if I have the requisite cables attached.

The creator of this case has made a “v2” and “v3” version of the case that look even better and allow you to screw the lid down instead of relying on a friction fit, but I didn’t see those when I was grabbing the first case that looked good and clicking “send to printer”.

One last link, because I had a couple of tweaks I wanted to make to the terminal connection after I got it established.  This site has some suggestions on using screen for the connection to your Pi that I appreciated.

What I’d like to find next is a terminal emulator for iPadOS.  That would let me turn this thing into a small companion device for an iPad while I’m out and about.  You can do this natively on a Raspberry Pi 4 or newer, since those switched from micro USB to USB-C, but I haven’t wanted to buy an entirely new Pi just to try that.  I’d also kinda like a way to avoid stress on the GPIO connection because it feels pretty flimsy.

Anyway, there we go.  Finally, an article about a serial connection on a blog whose name itself is a pun on modem speeds.  It didn’t even take twenty years.

Posted in gadgets, linux | Leave a comment

This feels wrong.

Posted on August 19, 2026 by baudattitude

This is, I think, my fourth time playing through the original Halo campaign – though in a variety of ways over the years.  There was a run-through of the original back in 2007, then I used the “Anniversary” remake as the send-off game for my Xbox 360 in 2015.  I thought that was pretty appropriate.

Then, in 2018 I decided I was going to immerse myself in Deep Halo Lore and went through a months-long process of reading all the Halo Novels and playing all of the Halo games again before starting Halo 5, this time using the Master Chief Collection on what was probably an Xbox One X by that point.

I can’t remember very much of it, and I think the experience was a bit ruined because it still didn’t give me much background for Halo 5 because a lot of the story was locked behind some weird mission mode. So I should probably never do anything like that again.

When Halo Infinite came out, I didn’t feel like putting myself through the process again, so I just played it.  I quite liked it, as an aside.

Now I’m starting Halo: Campaign Evolved, and…

well, it’s Halo.  It’s prettier, and I understand they have made some tweaks to later levels that I am looking forward to, but it’s still mostly the same game so far, just played using a DualSense this time.

It really does bring home the reason I decided to become a filthy console peasant again, though.  I booted it and had the option of “performance mode” or “quality mode” and then some toggles for Motion Blur, Screen Shake, Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain.  I did not need to decide between four different kinds of hair and agonize over which one was going to give me the Best Hair Experience.

For the record: I left motion blur on but turned off the other three.  The shaking during the Pillar of Autumn segment was giving me motion sickness and I think Halo looks best with a cleaner picture but there was something about the camera movement when I was turning that made me want a touch of blur effect.

Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain have their place in games – Alien: Isolation is one very obvious example of one where I feel they work – but Halo should be shiny and clean.  I feel this quite strongly.

I do hope Forza Horizon 6 also still manages a PS5 release.  The XBOX team seems to have realized that exclusives are good for a platform, and I genuinely hope they can turn their fortune around and give Sony a LITTLE competition in the market, but I’m going to be a little selfish there.

Oh, and for the record:  As hard as I tried, I could not find a single power socket on the Pillar of Autumn, and I certainly can’t judge any power sockets I might run across on the Halo itself by Earth standards.  So there will be no nit-picking of that this time.

Posted in PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

I got self discovery all up ins, yo.

Posted on August 19, 2026 by baudattitude

Not a typical post today, which may not be a bad thing since my typical posts feature screenshots of electrical outlets and the back sides of random computers in whichever Call of Duty or Resident Evil or whatever I’ve just played.

If that’s more your thing, come back later and there will be another one of those.  Though I think I may start the Remastered Halo next and I’m pretty sure there won’t be any electrical outlets to make fun of in that one.

Rest assured that I will look for them.

Rather I wanted to take a minute to ramble about the fun time I’m having navigating the “behavioral health” system which is a lovely name for it.  Kudos to whoever came up with that one.

Several months back, my wife noticed that I was not dealing with the challenges of a new job very well.  Which is, really, putting it mildly.  I was basically signing off every day in a state of stress that bordered on panic because I had so many things to do and at the end of the day I didn’t feel like I’d finished any of them.

So, because I’m a modern guy I decided I would talk to a professional and see if they had any advice.  That’s what you’re supposed to do these days.

And that professional was like, “uh, I’m not qualified to diagnose this but gosh you are checking all the boxes for ADHD.  Let me send you to someone who is.”

And the second professional confirmed her suspicions and we have been talking about coping strategies for it and trying a bunch of meds that are supposed to help me focus.  None of them have been great.  Some of them make me throw up more than others.  I don’t like those ones.  I’m not sure if the one I’m on now is helping or not but I feel awful when it wears off so it’s probably good while it’s working.  I’m scheduled to try a higher dose next and maybe that will be even better.

I’m not actually sure I remember what I was like before I started trying all the meds.

At one point he casually commented “hey, have you ever been evaluated for autism?” and I was like, “no, I haven’t but I’m pretty sure that’s not me” and he sort of let it slide and told me that regardless of what the answer was it probably didn’t matter because I was a dude in his 50s and this is the sort of thing that they really want to figure out early in life so they can put you in the right schools or whatever.

But in addition to the meds, which I’m not sure are great, he sent me to a counselor who was actually great.  We did 8 sessions where he just let me complain about things and gave me some gentle suggestions.  It is seriously amazing to have someone to talk to who will just let you talk and not interrupt.  I try to remember not to feel guilty about this because it costs a couple hundred bucks a session and I had better get to talk without getting interrupted.

After about six of those sessions, he casually drops a “hey, do you have any reactions to textures that other people don’t seem to have?” and after like a half hour of me telling him about how paper feels he ALSO asks if I’ve ever been evaluated for autism.

So that has been interesting because suddenly I am looking at weird stuff I have done all my life and it has explanations.

Some of it has cutesy Gen Z names, which I hate.

I am not “stimming”.

I am pointing at the things you can’t see so they know I know they’re there and won’t come closer.

There is a difference.

But it turns out that things like my reaction to paper textures, or the way I can’t remember / can’t picture faces, or my tendency to pick up random objects and spin them are all common autism things.  And this has been really kind of a bombshell.  Like, it doesn’t make me any less of a spaz but after over fifty years I know the source of my spaz nature.

I think it also explains a lot of why I fell so in love with Japan.  It’s a culture with a lot of rules, and those rules are written down for tourists so you know which side of the escalator to stand on, and how to use chopsticks and how to do things so you don’t cause too much meiwaku* for everyone around you.

* Translator’s note: meiwaku means “hassle”

Or in other words, having grown up being very oblivious to societal norms and needing to understand them by trial and error and making a lot of mistakes along the way, it’s really nice to experience a culture that comes with an instruction book.

Anyway.  That may have gotten a bit serious. Let me lighten things up by explaining the single most annoying thing about this, which is that whenever I have spoken to a real life friend and explained, “hey I have mental behavioral health professionals who are telling me these things about me, isn’t that just so weird and random…?”

NOT A SINGLE ONE HAS EXPRESSED ANY SURPRISE.

Posted in random | Leave a comment

We have God of War at home?

Posted on August 18, 2026 by baudattitude

I used to spend a regrettable amount of money on import gaming stores, all the way back to the Bad Old Days when I would justify dropping a hundred US dollars on an import copy of Toshinden for the Playstation because I couldn’t deal with the English dub and hadn’t yet realized that it was, in fact, an awful game.

I don’t do that often anymore.  For one thing, most stuff comes out in the US and usually includes the original language tracks – and for another,  both the PS5 and Switch make it easy to buy from other region stores so I can get the odd release that doesn’t make it over to the US.

(I really need to stop using so many hyphens – they make my posts look like they came out of an LLM.  I guarantee you that everything you read on this site is 100% human-authored mind rot.)

Despite the decreased need for import game stores, I do occasionally shop at play-asia.  Several years back they seemed to pivot to selling games that don’t get US releases but still have a translation, or games that are only sold in digital form in the US but got a physical release somewhere else… and they can be pretty aggressive about discounting.  These are desirable traits!

But, if I had one thing to say against them it would be that their shipping cost is pretty up there if you don’t meet the threshold for free shipping, and their threshold for free shipping is pretty high and often means that I wind up with just one more game in the shopping basket when I go to check out.

Pretty sure that’s how I wound up with Taboo Trial, because I’m not usually a roguelike player and I don’t have any particular attraction to Norse mythology.  The playable cast is made up of women with FASCINATING ideas of what constitutes battle-appropriate armor, and that would normally mean that it would be right in my wheelhouse, but I just don’t know if that would have been enough to warrant the add-to-cart button.

“Armor”

Anyway.  Whatever my reasoning, I bought it.

And I played it.  And it was, hmm.

Not great?

But let’s explore why “not great” stayed in the Switch until I managed to level up enough to complete a run of the game, because sometimes “not great” still has something interesting going for it.

In this case, ignoring the scantily-clad cast of characters, what it had going for it was some kinda neat enemy designs.

I liked the mechanical vibe of the bosses, even though I’m not sure they match up very well with their mythological counterparts.  And the environments, while not especially high budget, at least give a little bit of variety.

Plus you hit things and big numbers come out.  And the numbers are in different colors depending on what kind of damage you’re doing, which is critical to a proper experience.

I wasn’t very good at maintaining combos but I did see the meter go over 300 a couple of times.  Did it give me anything in return?  I don’t know, but numbers kept coming out.

The actual combat wasn’t much to talk about.  It felt frustratingly close to fun.  Like, at first I felt like everything was way too zoomed out and that my character was weirdly mute and then I dug into the options menu and found a lot of ways to tune my experience to make it better.

While levels and encounters aren’t randomized – which is weird for a roguelike – the skills you pick up during a level are randomized and sometimes you can get some truly game breaking ones.  Honestly I think this is the best selling point of the game, just collecting weird assortments of skills to make bigger and differently-colored numbers come out of things when you hit them with a big axe.

And, in keeping with the genre you can buy permanent upgrades after every run to make yourself stronger for the next one.

In addition, after playing through the game once you can increase the difficulty level which adds modifiers to the enemies but gives better rewards and…  look, honestly I was really confused about the amount of depth in this game because there seems to have been a lot of thought put into the systems but very little in the way of content.

Then I realized that the Switch version is a version locked in time, while the Steam version has gotten dozens of content updates.  So presumably if you want to get really into this game you play it on Steam.

I’m not sure if that version improves on the combat, mind you.  Like I said earlier, it’s close to fun but not quite there.  There’s a certain lack of reaction from the enemies you are slashing up that makes them not much more than red bars you have to empty.  A few sound effects and some a little more attention to impact animations would go a long way here.  Maybe that’s been improved on the PC.  I’m unlikely to ever know.

In addition to grinding for upgrades, you can also collect gifts and bestow them on some of the characters who are hanging around the hub level.  Some of them have even more fascinating ideas about what comprises armor than your main character does.

Oh, right.  You collect “holy water” from bosses.  I’m pretty sure that this is from a Chinese studio and they have some Opinions about alcohol in video games.  Anyway, if you ply some of the NPCs with enough “holy water” you disappear offscreen for some sesbian lex and when you come back you can run around in their skin.

It sounds creepy when I put it that way.

I mean, it IS pretty creepy, so that tracks. I guess.

After about four runs I got a good combination of skills and made it through to the end, which is where I got one of the funniest game over screens I can remember and unlocked a bunch of new systems that I am not going to engage with.

“Triumphed!” (faceplants in the snow)

I’d say it’s a solid 5/10.  There’s a game here that you can play from beginning to end, and it doesn’t ask much of your time.  The Switch continues to be the console where I discover the sort of unpolished or just-plain-weird indie games that would be completely lost in the noise on Steam.

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

My Little Soulslike Can’t Be This Cute

Posted on August 16, 2026 by baudattitude

Normally I put a picture of the game’s title screen here, but this game doesn’t have a title screen that really worked for the bit.  In its place, have a picture of my Switch 2 Dashboard.

After finishing Black Flag Resynced and Battlefield 6, then bouncing pretty hard off a couple of games that didn’t hook me, I needed something light and fluffy and that didn’t take up a lot of time.

I spent some time paging through my PS5 and Steam libraries, not really finding anything that fit the bill, and was *this close* to deciding that an Atelier game would fulfill the “light and fluffy” criteria even if it would probably be a bit longer than I was really in the mood for… and then I remembered that the Switch exists and that I have a solid shelf full of games for it that I’ve picked up on trips to Japan.

One of them was Little Witch Nobeta, a game I didn’t know much about other than that one of the voice actresses had made the mistake of saying that Taiwan was a country and enraged a lot of people who do not agree with that sentiment.  Apparently that was enough to get me to drop Y3400 on the game.  That’s like twenty bucks, which is a real bargain considering it’s $50 on the US eShop for no adequately explored reason.

The cover art made me assume it’d be light and fluffy and a quick glance at howlongtobeat gave me a Main Story estimate of 6 and a half hours and that was enough to lock in.

Nobeta’s default outfit.

I did not realize it was actually a soulslike.  Not a hard core one, by any means, but someone in Japan woke up one morning and said to themselves “What if Dark Souls, but cute?” and then MADE IT HAPPEN.  Well done.  Most mornings I wake up and my one resolve is to somehow make it to my desk to pick up my work headset and start taking calls. That’s the extent of my ambition.

That description is a little unfair, and I feel I should expand on it.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is a soulslike:

  • You’re in a creepy gothic castle.
  • Stuff respawns when you rest at save points.
  • You use the same currency for leveling your skills as for buying things.
  • Stuff likes to kill you a lot.
  • Managing stamina for dodging and sprinting is important.
  • Bosses have big red health bars.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is not a soulslike:

  • You don’t drop all your souls when you die.
  • It’s pretty easy, at least on the “Standard” difficulty.
  • Gameplay is mostly 3rd person shooter style while most Souls games are melee heavy.
  • Your character is adorable instead of some sort of monstrosity from the depths of a character creator.
  • You have a cat.

You’re going to have to forgive me for that picture.  I know it’s super dark, but most of my screenshots involving the cat also involve big story spoilers.

It’s not quite as light and fluffy as I’d expected from the box art, and some of the story does get a little on the heavy side before wrapping up with a happy ending.  Stuff like dealing with a sarcastic talking cat, or unlocking a maid outfit, or watching Nobeta try to open doors by pulling on switches that are well out of her reach help to lighten the mood though.

It also has the best “do not walk forward if there is anything else you still want to do” warning screen I’ve ever seen.  Like, there is no mistaking what happens if you walk forward from this point:

As far as gameplay, I mentioned that it’s a 3rd person shooter – and, barring a melee attack you will occasionally use for breaking open chests, you will spend most of your time cycling through your choice of four weapons spells to fit the needs of the moment.

Fourth not depicted here.  It’s “Lightning”.

While the spells have elemental types, I didn’t run into many cases where enemies were immune to, say, fire.  Rather, the spells differ in what sort of gun they map to.  Fire is your shotgun, Ice is a machine gun, Arcade a semiautomatic rifle or pistol of some sort and Lightning is your sniper.  All of these also have a “charge” attack and these can be quite satisfying.  Lightning’s charge attack is an orbital nuke, for example, and the charged attack for Ice throws a ton of light spears at your target in a way that reminded me a great deal of Aldrich in Dark Souls III, with the exception that you’re the one doing the throwing instead of the one desperately trying to roll out of the way, of course..

Anyway, you have a character I will describe as World’s Best Daughter and you have  satisfying …gunplay? it’s spells, not guns, but “spellplay” doesn’t sound right… and this makes a solid core to build a game around.

The environments and enemies aren’t quite up to the same level of quality, though.  The castle is very gray, though occasionally you’ll go outside or have to navigate platforms over lava pits, and it’s very dark.  Many of the enemies are various colors of blobs that don’t particularly stand out.  There are some exceptions, like a sort of scissors-wielding puppet that is quite nasty, and the one room in the game where you encounter mimics and suddenly you’re fighting extremely mean treasure chests.  But mostly it’s blobs.  Some blobs float, some kind of inch around, some can disappear into the ground and pop out at you.  hashtag-just-blob-things.

The bosses are pretty neat, though.  I didn’t bother taking screenshots of the first boss, because he’s basically just a suit of armor, and I won’t show the final boss because it would be quite the spoiler, but I’ll show off the three bosses that come in between those:

You got your cute girl with giant creepy puppet.

Cute girl riding a very angry bear.

…and the obligatory boob monster.

Since it’s a game for the original Switch, it’s not the greatest looking game.  I wasn’t in the least surprised to see it running at 720p even on the Switch 2 in docked mode.  I doubt there will ever be a Switch 2 patch.  It IS available for PS4 and on Steam so those versions almost certainly look better.

While a Switch 2 resolution patch is unlikely, at least I saw the benefits of the beefy hardware in the newer console.  I’m not particularly sensitive to frame rate, but I understand that the game had some pretty bad frame rates on the older hardware and I saw very little of that.  One of the outdoor bits had some notable stutter, but at least it was during a part that didn’t have anything trying to kill you.

To sum up: while it wasn’t exactly what I expected going in, it turned out to be very much worth the price of admission.  I think I’ll keep going with the fluffy theme and see what else I have that fits.

 

 

Posted in videogames, Switch | Leave a comment

More like “Battlefield: Six Hours,” amirite?

Posted on August 7, 2026 by baudattitude

I really shouldn’t make fun of the length of the Battlefield 6 campaign, because knowing that it had a short campaign was one of the motivating factors in checking it out from the local public library.  I also don’t think many people buy the Battlefield games for the single player story, and the trophy statistics back me up on this:

It’s a very short campaign, the game has been out for 8 months next week, and only 12% of the people who dropped the 70 bucks on the game have bothered to see the end credits.

Actually, one of the reasons that I really haven’t explored the franchise in the past (I did play Battlefield One because I got it in a bundle with Titanfall 2) is that I was under the impression that it was an exclusively-multiplayer affair.  In truth, while there have been a handful of entries that eschewed a story mode, the majority of the titles have included at least a little bit of story.

I started out trying to judge the story by setting it next to  recent Calls of Duty games, but quickly realized that I realized that I probably shouldn’t compare the two, despite the games having largely similar gameplay and audiences.  The recent CoD games have gone just absolutely insane, in a way that I admittedly enjoy, while BF6 tells a more grounded story set in a mostly-plausible near future.

I’ll touch on the story briefly before I get on to the thing I really enjoy about any of these big AAA games, which is making fun of the set decorations.

While the story was, as mentioned, rather grounded – I wasn’t suffering from nanomachine-induced hallucinations at ANY point – I still had fun with it.  It felt weirdly abbreviated and there was certainly a lack of different settings, but it laid out the good guys and the bad guys and gave ample justification for inserting bullet A into bad guy B a couple of thousand times between the opening title and the ending credits.

I’m not actually sure if the bad guy is supposed to be some kind of crazy terrorist or if he’s just a current-day sociology professor.

The first two, maybe three levels are really nothing special.  You shoot a bunch of mans.  Most levels have you playing different members of your squad who all have different specialties.

Man these screenshots turned out dark.  There are three people in this picture.  My favorite, both in terms of playstyle and personality, was “Gecko” on the far left.

After the game gets to Cairo, which I think is the fourth level, things improve vastly.  There still aren’t a ton of different environments, but it does a good job of throwing new things at you and it’s a slow-paced level that has the entire team together so there’s a lot of lore dumping in the form of inter-team banter.

Getting back to Gecko, I enjoyed the more sniper-focused levels with her and the adorable murder drone she gets to deploy during one level was one of, like, three high points of the gameplay.

This was number two.  This little grenade launcher shows up a lot so you almost always have the option of carrying one and it has a surprisingly long range and surprisingly flat arc and it is really good at turning enemy snipers into tomato paste.

Number three is the shotgun.  ShotGUNS, probably, I assume there are multiple versions.  Going all the way back to the original Doom, the quality of a game’s shotgun can make or break the game, and BF6 has one of the good ones.  There aren’t many levels where you are fighting dudes at close enough range to make effective use of a shotgun, but it’s very satisfying on the levels where you can use it.

Before continuing, though, one thing that definitely did not sit well was the game’s dedication to equality.  Like, half of the bad guys were actually bad gals so you get to hear a LOT of women screaming in pain and dying.  There’s one bit in particular where you get the drop on a room full of enemies and throw grenades in and then rappel in to shoot anyone still standing and the sounds are not good sounds.  Like, I did not feel like I was on the side of the angels at that particular moment.

Still, that aside, I think the highest praise I can give is this:

It convinced me to spend nearly EIGHT DOLLARS on used copies of the previous games to give their campaigns a try too.

So.  Let’s talk the set dressing now, because I love these games with crazy high budgets that spend them on painstakingly modeling assets that nobody is ever going to actually slow down and look at.

If you’ve read any of my similar posts previously that talked about Resident Evil or Call of Duty, one thing you might expect here is a rundown of every desktop computer shown in the campaign, complete with me trying to figure out what real world computer it represents.

So, here.  Here is every desktop computer shown during the campaign:

That black barely-visible tower on the far right? As far as I could tell, that was IT for desktop computers in a game that had you going through a lot of environments where you would reasonably expect to see desktop computers.

It’s not like there weren’t monitors.

There were SO MANY monitors, of different sizes (the bad guys get the ultra wides, which I find unfair), and they would usually have some computer graphics texture up on the screen and a keyboard in front of them and about 50% of the time there would be a mouse… but there would not be any computers there to be generating the screen.

It does, at least, have electrical outlets.  I didn’t see any of them outside of the US so I can’t judge whether, say, Egyptian electrical outlets were correct but at least US outlets were the typical and appropriate 3-prong NEMA5-15R receptacles…

…is what I WOULD say except this is in a BATHROOM and it is NOT A GFCI OUTLET.  They shipped this in the year of our lord 2025 and made such a basic mistake.  I cannot even.

One thing they did nicely was that license plates on cars were localized.  I can’t read Arabic, but cars in Egypt had Arabic glyphs on their plates and cars in New York had plates that looked like New York plates.

This random pizza box in Egypt was a bit of a miss on the attention-to-detail meter, though:

I suspect that “Oscar’s Pizza”  is a very unusual name for a pizza restaurant in Egypt.  You see pizza boxes from the same restaurant in New York, which makes considerably more sense.

So.  Computers.  Outlets.  Random bits of set dressing.  What’s next?

What else? Scooters.

Scooters show up quite often in Bf6, which makes sense considering the locales you’re generally running through. It’s pretty much just one model with four different paint jobs, though.

Black.  White.  Brown.

I was going to give them some credit for these scooters, because they do NOT have the ugly US-mandated bug-stalk-eye turn indicators.  These ones weren’t in the US so them having those turn indicators would be really weird.

…but then you get to New York and there are orange scooters and…

We’ll ignore the lack of a license plate, even as I praise the game for having license plates that made a given levels’ regions.  What we cannot ignore is that this thing does not have the correct turn indicators so it is officially unsafe to ride by the laws of the United States and you would never get a registration for it.

Of course, it doesn’t have a license plate so they may never have bothered getting it registered.  I don’t like the image this paints of scooter owners.  The vast majority of us are law-abiding citizens.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever touch the multiplayer butI liked the campaign well enough that I definitely feel like my tax dollars that go, in very small part, to providing funds for the local library are being well spent.

 

 

 

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Oh. It’s “Marconi Plays the Mambo”. Huh.

Posted on August 5, 2026 by baudattitude

 

My history with Unix goes back a long ways – nearly 40 years at this point, which is somewhat humbling – and one thing that I’ve always kind of held to during that time is that I should stick to using tools that I can reliably expect to be present on any system I’m using.

So, the first text editor I learned way back in the 80s was vi, and that editor is still present on every single Unix based system I’ve ever logged in to, so I’ve never really been tempted to learn nano.  At some point it got renamed to vim which did confuse me a little bit but I just alias vi=’vim’ and then I am back in a safe place.

Point of order:  I can’t be said to ever have really learned vi.  But I can get around.

Anyway.  A side effect of this is that, traditionally, I don’t mess around with installing extra STUFF.  I certainly don’t dig deep into personalization, and I’ve always kind of looked at things like completion helpers with a sort of suspicion and disdain.  My terminal sessions get a simple monospaced font installed and the text gets set to green-on-black as God intended and that is how Things Should Be.

…until a couple of weeks ago, when I had to work with a customer via a zoom session and got to watch him doing things in the terminal that left me gobsmacked.

Fast forward to today and I have been, as the kids say, ricing the heck out of my systems.

Well.  I’m not sure what I’m doing really counts as that.  Mostly it’s been installing utilities like eza, fd, fzf, bat and ripgrep, then finally figuring out the difference between .zshenv, .zprofile and .zshrc and what should go in each of them, making XDG-compliant directories in $HOME even though macOS really doesn’t use them by default, and theming everything I can with the rather pleasant “catppuccin” color scheme.  I think that last is the only thing that’s really “ricing” though I can’t be said to understand the language of the youths on any given day.

Oh, and vim!

vim has colors now!  They’re oddly muted in this screenshot, but it’s quite pretty in person.  I’ve even installed PLUGINS for vim, which doesn’t gel at all with my previous stance on keeping everything vanilla so I don’t get reliant on things that may not be present if I log into a random system.

I’m half considering – and I can scarcely believe I’m saying this – switching to neovim.

And even if I do feel dirty about the whole thing, I have to admit that it’s easier to remember

fd .log -X bat --show-range -50:

than it is to remember

find ~+ -name "*.log" -exec bat --show-range -50: {} \;

and I know this is easier because, despite having run one version of another of the find command above many times over the years, I still initially forgot the trailing \; when I was typing this up.

There’s only been one little problem.  The utility that seems to be the go-to for theming your terminal prompt and making it pretty is called “starship” and for a person of a certain vintage that leads to having a song stuck in your head All.  The.  Time.

Specifically “We Built This City”.

However, one positive side effect of this is that, after four decades, I have finally gotten fed up enough with not understanding the lyrics that I actually LOOKED THEM UP.

 

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Bigger. Blacker. More Creeds.

Posted on August 1, 2026 by baudattitude

After about 60 hours by the in-game clock, or nearly 70 by the PS5 dashboard, I think I can safely say I got my money’s worth from Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag: Resynced.

That doesn’t look right.  I think I should probably drop a colon.  I’ll just avoid the issue from here on out.

I’ve groused enough about how I wasn’t fond of the original Black Flag for abandoning the Desmond storyline, and I think there’s even a post or two on here about how I thought ACIII was a godawful mess of systems that didn’t make any sense in the context of a Native American trying to avenge his murdered mother and tribe.  I won’t rehash those, other than to say that both of them were really good examples of how games can be a lot better if I let myself engage with them where they want to be.

Connor’s random homestead-building and naval-captaining still doesn’t make any sense, but when I went back for a second run through ACIII and actually engaged with those I found a lot to enjoy, and when I stopped critiquing Edward Kenway for Greatest-American-Heroing his way into his Assassin skills and just got down to roaming the Caribbean and stabbing mans what needed stabbing I really liked it.  That same experience carried over to the remake – it’s a big dang world full of stuff to DO while occasionally intersecting with the storyline, and even if the gameplay loop of “Discover Island – Climb Viewpoints – Find Chests and Secrets – Stab some English/Spanish dudes – Find next Island” can be repetitive, it’s fun repetitive.

My absolute favorite thing to do in an AC game continues to be walking up to an outpost and picking one random watchman or guard to leave completely unscathed while I sneak past him and scathe the HECK out of all of his friends and co-workers.  I like to imagine they finish their shift and go to clock out and are suddenly like, WHAT HAPPENED HERE.

I liked it enough to put myself through this, anyway:

Thankfully I was warned that I should probably prioritize sending out brigs as soon as I unlocked the naval mission board, so I got to avoid the most tedious part of the platinum trophy.

Though most of the changes make for Resynced are positive, I have a couple of Thoughts that I will now share with the three or four people who will ever read this:

First: The interview where Ubisoft said that they had added the option to turn off sharks for those of us who are freaked out by underwater enemies was a lie.  Yes, there is an option to automatically repel shark attacks BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.  I want a shark free experience.  I don’t deal well with underwater enemies – heck I even have bad memories of the stupid eel in Mario 64, without even the excuse of encountering him as a youth since Mario 64 didn’t come out until I was nearly 30 years old.

I did make it through the diving sequences in the 2013 version, which didn’t have the auto-repel OR the option to turn on unlimited breath, but apparently I was made of sterner stuff back then.

Second: While Assassin’s Creed has always leaned heavily into counterattacks to break an opponent’s defenses, Resynced really sank deep into the depths of parryslop.  It slowed down fights to an interminable degree at times – but, worse still, it absolutely neutered the berserk darts that are usually one of the more fun tools in your arsenal.  Berserking a couple of brutes and watching them lay into their hapless colleagues isn’t nearly as fun when all you are seeing from your vantage point is block after block.

Third and final thought: The checkpointing before boss fights and often halfway through boss fights was very appreciated.  There should always be just a little bit of a breather where you are out of combat and can actually change your equipment, though, because I went into one fight with a couple of swords that I had just gotten and decided to try out and they were NOT my cool swords that restored health on successful takedowns and the game did NOT refill my healing items before the boss and… honestly, let’s leave it to your imagination.  I did get through it.  After a couple of tries.  Which involved sitting through unskippable cutscenes every time.

Anyway.  A lot of times, I find these posts myself, a few years after I’ve written them, when I try to decide whether I should replay something.

To future me: Yes!  Go for it!  But stick to the main storyline!  You can take a minute or ten to unlock your officers when those side quests become available, but don’t go crazy chasing dots on the map!  And always refill your tools and bullets before starting any quests!

 

 

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Superpowers, convenient:

Posted on July 27, 2026 by baudattitude

Still playing Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag: Resynced.  Still very good!  But, that’s not the topic of today’s post.  Today, we explore a useful superpower.

Some background: Several years ago, in the throes of a midlife crisis, I bought a Kymco Like 150i scooter – probably the best thing I’ve bought this century.  I’m not a big fan of driving as I’ve always been a little hesitant and uncertain about where the corners of the car are, but on a motorcycle you really don’t have that problem.  It turned “running to the store for milk” from an unpleasant task to a rather pleasant little jaunt.

It didn’t do well with speeds above about 50 miles per hour, and it tended to get blown about a bit if there was a crosswind, so eventually I upgraded to a Suzuki Burgman 400.  This was a much more beefy lad and also introduced me to the strange world of Suzuki owners.  Seriously.  Riding that bike resulted in SO MANY random conversations with other people who owned Suzukis or who had previously owned Suzukis.  I’m pretty sure it’s not really a cult, but gosh.

That bike got stolen.  I did not take this well.  It took me a long time before I could look at scooters again, and when I finally did I found that there were very slim pickings in town as the shop I’d always gone to previously had closed down.

There was a random power sports dealer who had a Yamaha Xmax 300 on their web site, though, and despite my misgivings I steeled myself and drove over to ask about buying it.

This didn’t go particularly well.  The salesman I spoke to first denied having the bike, then when presented with the listing from their website made a show of calling their inventory department to confirm they didn’t have it, then was rather shocked to learn that they DID have it.  It was just in their storage area, and we walked over to look at it.

Once we found it – it was in the very back of the warehouse, tucked behind some crates, we discovered that it hadn’t been moved to the floor because they hadn’t quite finished building it.  Apparently motorcycles and scooters are shipped to the dealer in a not-quite-assembled state for …reasons?

Anyway.  I looked at it, it looked like the same bike I’d already done research on, I told them to finish building it and I’d come back and buy it.

The salesman then tried to get me to sign a sales contract there and then, with a sales pitch that included “these are really popular bikes and a lot of people ask about them, I can’t guarantee we won’t sell it before you come back.”

Yes.  The bike he had denied the very existence of was suddenly very popular and in demand.

I declined.  I went home.  I got a call the next day saying that they’d started the process of building it and I could come by in the afternoon.

So I loaded up a duffle bag with a helmet and riding jacket and called a Lyft and was on the way over when my phone rang.

It turned out the bike wasn’t quite ready, and the salesperson seemed very vague about the reasons why.

I got to the dealership and got to met a sales manager who was practically apoplectic.  It turned out that, while they had the bike… they couldn’t find all the parts.  Specifically the side mirrors, but more importantly the KEYS.

These aren’t just any keys.  The Xmax 300 is a keyless start bike, so it comes with fobs rather than physical keys.  They’re paired to the computer in the bike.  Getting new keys and reprogramming them is apparently something Yamaha charges in excess of a thousand dollars to do, and the mirrors aren’t particularly cheap either.

Basically the dealership’s entire profit margin on this bike was kaput.

Suddenly, it made sense why it was buried in the warehouse.  According to the sales manager, he’d already fired the guy responsible.

Not sure I buy that, but hey.  Cool story.

Anyway, I confirmed with them that I still wasn’t going to buy it until it was a working bike and asked them to call me when it was ready.

We’re not to the superpower bit yet.  Sorry, this is dragging on.

Skipping over a bunch of stuff, they eventually found the bits and finished building the bike and were a little vexed because I put it on a credit card instead of accepting their financing and suddenly I owned a scooter again.

Oh, and it’s a joy to ride.  10/10 would recommend.  300cc is a  smaller engine than the Burgman offered, but she go zoom when needed.

A month or so later, I got plates in the mail, and a note from the state saying “these aren’t valid until you get your registration, DO NOT put them on your bike”.

I didn’t get my registration.  I did get a letter from Yamaha welcoming me to the family and inviting me to take a survey on my purchase.

A month or so after that, I got a letter from the state telling me there’d been a problem with the registration and that there were missing documents.

I called the dealership.

Guy I spoke to – let’s call him J – told me that they’d seen the same letter from the state and they’d already resubmitted everything but that the state only processed documents once a month (huh). so it might take a few weeks. He also mentioned that their title clerk had been fired and that he’d been stuck with doing all the title paperwork.

I expressed sympathy and told him I hoped he didn’t get stuck with the job permanently, and he assured me that, no, he was only doing it temporarily.

3 weeks later, I called back.  Spoke to someone who was not J but was promised a call back.

He didn’t call back, and if I called and asked for “J” I just kept getting promised return calls that didn’t come.

Finally, I called and said “Hi, I’m returning a call from J, he said it was important” and got immediately transferred to J.

This isn’t a superpower, but it is a cheat code.  Use it yourself.

This time, he blamed both the state and the 3rd party title processor the dealership uses.  He offhandedly mentioned the name of the title company.  It sounded like “B2”.  He promised he’d look into it and call me back tomorrow.

By this point it had been 2 days shy of 3 months and my bike was about to become illegal to ride as it had only come with a 90 day trip permit.

I didn’t get a call back.  I looked at the letter from the state.  It had a phone number for “dealer services” which didn’t sound like something I should be calling.

I called it anyway, and spoke to a very friendly woman who understood my plight, confirmed they had received the initial set of documents without everything needed, had not received any documents since, and sent me a new trip permit and a link to an Enforcement and Investigation department should I want to file a complaint with the state about the dealership.   Especially, as it turns out, because they don’t send a letter to the vehicle owner until they have already sent a letter to the dealer and waited for a reply.

I put that, along with the survey from Yamaha, into a mental bucket labeled “things to do when I decide to get angry”.

I called J back.  Eventually – six days later – I got back through to him.  The “I’m returning a call from J” loophole had been discovered and people warned about it, because it didn’t work again.

He AGAIN blamed “B2” and swore that all the documentation had been submitted.

I waited about two weeks, fuming a bit, mentally toying with the things in the bucket.

Eventually I decided to look up who or what B2 was.  Turns out it’s “Vitu” who is a very large title processing company.  Surely they only talk to dealers and have no interest in talking to consumers, right?

I started looking up phone numbers and calling them and being extremely polite and just a little lost at people who answered the phone and eventually I got transferred to another very friendly woman who I will call M.

This is the superpower, by the way. If you are personable and clueless, it turns out that there are a lot of people who can’t help but want to help you.

M was amazing and rather invested in getting the processing of my paperwork complete as it had been sitting on HER desk for over three months at this point and she needed one simple document from the power sports place and they were not sending it.  She told me what document they needed.

I called J.

I was promised a call back.

I rode over to the power sports place.  J was in a meeting.  I elected to wait.  I struck up a conversation with the salesman who had originally sold me the bike.  He reiterated how popular they were and how they couldn’t keep them in stock and how I’d been lucky to get one.

I remembered him talking about his son, and it was summer vacation by this time, so I asked if he was being driven crazy by having the kid home all day and then we became the best of friends and wound up talking about all the anime he was watching with said kid.

To be honest, the guy had very – pardon the phrase – “basic bitch” taste.  Nothing but battle shonen stuff.  We found common ground in Demon Slayer, however, and both of us believe very firmly that Nezuko does not get let out of her box to kick arse often enough.

Eventually J emerged from his office, acknowledged that I was there, and ushered me back into his little cave where I name-dropped everyone I had spoken to at the state and at Vitu and gosh it was just such a mix-up all around but they need this One Specific Document and can we get that taken care of.  Right now.  While I’m in your office.

I was all smiles!  What a pleasant guy to have in your office!  So understanding!

OK, maybe some of the smiles showed more teeth than strictly necessary.

He again blamed the fired title clerk.  I sympathized, and just to twist the knife a bit I asked if the company had hired a new one or if he’d simply been stuck with adding it to his duties.  All smiles.

Anyway.  He printed a form.  We both signed it.  He swore that it would be mailed off to Vitu in the morning.  I shook his hand.  All smiles.  I left.

I waited about two weeks and called Vitu again.

“Hi, I’m returning a call from M, she said it was important?”

“Oh, M isn’t in today but I can help you.  What did you need?”

I detailed my predicament.  She looked up my bike by VIN.  She said “of course it’s (dealership)” and sighed.

They had, in fact, gotten the form from the dealership.  It hadn’t been mailed the next day but it had eventually been mailed and had already been turned around and sent to the state.

12 days later,  four and a half months after riding the bike off the lot.  I finally got the title and registration.

I have no idea how long this would have taken if I hadn’t picked up the phone and started calling phone numbers that didn’t seem designed for me to call them.  I suspect Vitu would still be waiting for that form and the state would still be waiting on Vitu and J would still be complaining that the dealership still hadn’t hired a title clerk to replace the last one.

I guess I can put the plates on now.

 

 

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