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.

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

Posted in linux, mac | Leave a comment

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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2026: Year of the remake?

Posted on July 20, 2026 by baudattitude

I’ve been doing much better about playing the games I buy more or less when I buy them, and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag: Resynced is the latest example of this, in that I preordered it, had the disc delivered on release date and had it in the console and installing only a few minutes later.

Mind you it took like two hours to install and download patches, and I only played for about an hour that night, but I bought a game and then PLAYED THE GAME.

I’ve put another dozen hours in since.  I’m not very far in the story and really haven’t done a ton of side activities but I have been having a lot of fun sneaking through bushes and whistling at guards who walk over and get stabbed.

Sometimes they see the feet of the last guard sticking out of the bush and get all freaked out and then that’s where I come out of the OTHER bush and stab them.

That’s when I’m not just walking up behind dudes who are having a pleasant chat and stabbing them.

Pictures taken moments before disaster

This is not my first time through the Caribbean with Edward, though it’s been less time than you might think.  The ending of Assassin’s Creed III annoyed me so greatly that, even though I received ACIV as a gift in 2013, I only got far enough into it to confirm that, yes, they had in fact killed off the entire Desmond storyline and no, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I then put the disc back on the shelf and did not play it any further until 2018.

Yes, five years later.

Look, I can hold a grudge.

Anyway.  The Resynced edition pulls off the greatest thing a remake can do, which is that it looks as gorgeous as your memories of the original.  And it IS a pretty game, and very appropriate for summertime vibes.

I know I took some screenshots of my ship in the older version.  I wanted to compare them.  I just can’t find them.

I will say that combat seems tougher.  Apparently they took away some options from the original, but as it’s been 8 years I can’t remember the original combat very well.  I’m sure that if I did remember them I would be upset.

See : previous note about being able to hold a grudge.

Importantly, there is a new feature where you can have a ship’s cat.  Possibly multiple cats.  I only own one cat so far.  I have two monkeys but really… cats.

He hangs around on the railing of the bridge when you’re not in combat and when it’s not raining.  Peak cat.

Also, it understands – unlike the Uncharted games – that if you have a waterfall in a game it needs to have a cave behind it with a chest in.

All in all, pretty dang good time so far.

Also, while I still feel a little dirty about caving and buying a console again, I’m given to understand that the game is still a bit unstable under Linux – so if I HAD bought it from Steam, I would be booting into Windows to play it.  I would feel considerably dirtier about this.

 

 

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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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