Food Girls. That’s it. That’s the title.

Posted on May 17, 2023 by baudattitude

Playing two Switch games in a row is pretty unusual, but hanging out with Klonoa reminded me that I actually own the system and that it’s a pretty decent handheld.  Hence this post.

Today, I would like to talk about Food Girls, which was a super enjoyable visual novel / resource management game where you are set in the role of a business consultant and tasked with revitalizing a Taiwanese street market.  While there are a number of businesses and food stalls, you decide to focus on these three characters and their shops:

Left-to-right: Lulu, who runs a pork bowl shop and is hopelessly addicted to online games, Bubbles, who runs a Bubble Tea shop and is your standard-issue twin tail tsundere with no politeness filter, and Aurora who runs a fried chicken stall and is naive, friendly, and also stacked.

The subtitled names don’t match the Japanese names, but eh.  I won’t fuss.

Since I don’t speak more than three words of Mandarin, I’m happy to report that there is a Japanese dub and an English translation, which is perfectly tolerable with only the occasional glitchy translation.

There are a few side characters as well, most of whom are also cute girls.  There’s a token male character in the form of the street market president, but he’s almost completely absent from the storyline unless you spend a lot of time unlocking a sort of weird conspiracy subplot.

Sakura is probably my favorite of the side characters because she looks like an adorable helpless young thing and at the same time has connections to the mob that are never fully spelled out.  Plus she beats up a mob of thugs that are hired to intimidate you at one point.

The game is pretty simple.  You have 84 days to turn around the street market, you can perform up to 4 actions a day, and everything you do is in the service of either improving your relationship with one of the vendors, improving their popularity or improving the quality of the food.

During all of this, you also frequently have little interactions with the girls, and each has their own story that unlocks slowly as your relations improve.

For the record, I was a super fan of Bubbles.  I may just like violent girls.

Most days end with a side event where you might be tasked with helping the vendors deal with a belligerent drunk, feeding stray cats or simply watching helplessly as torrential rains ruin the day’s sales numbers, and you get a scorecard based on the market’s performance every 28 days, with a minimum score required to continue.  I never had trouble making the numbers, but the game does have a hard mode if you want more risk.

For replay value, the game has at least five endings.  Each girl has an “S-rank” ending, which is easy enough to get if you pick one and devote time to them.  I also found that there are entirely different “A-rank” endings on one of my playthroughs.  I think these are probably harder to get than the S-ranks.

Beyond the character-specific ones, there is the previously-mentioned conspiracy story which requires you to spend a lot of your day running investigations into the street market.  This takes away time from the market, so your numbers will take quite a hit, but once you finish this side plot the game ends with a happy enough you-saved-the-day sort of ending.

And then there’s the “Perfect Ending”, which is actually something of a feat to achieve.

Food Girls is based around multiple play-throughs, with certain items carrying over from route to route to make the next session easier.  Even after unlocking all of them, however, sticking the landing for the best ending takes a ton of planning and careful time management to pull off.  I was – figuratively – biting my nails through the last 20 or so days of my perfect ending run and didn’t actually lock in the victory conditions until day 82.  Since day 84 consists of the final evaluation, I really only cleared it with one day to spare.

I’m pretty new to resource management games like this, but the combination of management sim + visual novel segments + cute characters turned out to be a real winner.  Since you can fast forward through anything you’ve seen before, getting through it five times to see all of the endings wasn’t too arduous, and the close call I had on my perfect ending run meant that I got to watch the story conclusion and end credits with a serious sense of satisfaction.

While Food Girls didn’t get a Switch release in the West, you can import it physically or digitally, and it’s also available on Steam for PC and Mac for 20 bucks.  Strongly recommended if you want the digital equivalent of eating sugar by the spoonful.

Posted in Switch, videogames, visual novels | Leave a comment

Two Decades with Gaming’s Best Boy.

Posted on May 14, 2023 by baudattitude

To be clear, it’s this guy:

And I’ll let one of his sidekicks sum up why:

…because it’s easier than actually putting my own thoughts into words, and honestly I could probably ask an AI to write up an article gushing about the Klonoa series and it would do ten times the job I’ll ever do.

But, to try: He’s just the most relentlessly positive and cheerful mascot in gaming, and his games are genuinely joyful to play.  Most of them – I’ll ignore the spin-off JRPG and beach volleyball games – are puzzle platformers where the enemies are also the prime way to navigate through the hazards.  Almost every move Klonoa makes involves getting pixels away from being hurt by something, grabbing it before it can actually hit him, and then using it to  jump higher or break an obstacle.

I am very, very, very bad at puzzle platformers, and this is why it’s taken me nearly two decades to play through the mere five games in the series.

The first Klonoa game was a PS1 game, and it was one of those that came out in a very limited print run, disappeared from store shelves, and then was only available for scalper prices – which was, ironically, better marketing for the game then anything the publisher did.  It at least made me aware of the game, even if I couldn’t afford to play it.

In mid 2004, I got a Game Boy Advance when Nintendo released their Peak Nostalgia NES-themed model.  It was only a few months before the release of the Nintendo DS, and GBA games were already pretty cheap so I owned quite a few, and the system itself was tiny and the perfect way to get some slacking in during the work day.  I should probably apologize to my employers of the era because frankly they subsidized hours of GBA playing while I was technically on the clock.

Anyway.  One of those games played on my employer’s time was Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament, and it was the first Klonoa game I managed to finish.  Since it was actually the FIFTH game in the series, it was probably a bad place to start but, eh.

I eventually found a used copy of Klonoa: Empire of Dreams and played that as well, but much later.

After the GBA games were released, Namco actually published a Wii remake of the original Playstation game, and I snapped that up and had a blast with it.   That was 2009.

And then I tried Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil.  And it did not go well.

See, my typical way of covering for my absolute lack of skill when it comes to platform games is simply to repeat earlier levels over and over again until I have stored up enough lives to brute force my way through the levels that are actually difficult.

You can’t do this in Klonoa 2.  It was released during the era when games had to be hard enough that they couldn’t be completed during a rental period.  You can pick up extra lives by gathering 100 gems floating around the levels, and there are occasional 1UP items you can pick up, but they don’t respawn when you replay a level.  If you go back to the Klonoa 2 equivalent of World 1-1 after clearing it, there are no new gems to collect.

There is a level, not very far into the game, where you have to navigate a series of platforming challenges while being chased by a murderous death robot.  If it catches you, you start over.  Once you run out of lives, you can continue, but you start over at the beginning of the level with three lives.

I bounced off this level VERY hard, and eventually gave up.  I don’t often give up on a game I’m really enjoying because of a single difficulty spike, but this one just broke me.

In 2017 (I did say “much later”) I played Klonoa: Empire of Dreams and then the Wonderswan-exclusive Klonoa: Moonlight Museum.  Neither of those were nearly as bad, though I remember I did have to resort to some save scumming on Empire of Dreams.

It was also my first and only exposure to the Wonderswan hardware, which was a neat piece of tech for its day even if it dearly needed a 3.5mm headphone jack.

So, at this point I’d played through 4 of the 5 “mainline” Klonoa games and was just kind of resigned to, but annoyed by, the idea that I’d never finish Lunatea’s Veil.  I even considered emulating it to take advantage of save states, but had to give up on this because it was one of the few games you couldn’t play on the PS2 emulators of the time.

Then Namco (now Bandai-Namco) released a remastered version of both Playstation games, and I thought about it again.   It had been years since rental periods were a concern for publishers, so maybe they’d made it a little easier?  But since I have moved completely over to digital purchases, I didn’t want to buy it and find out that it was just as frustrating and then have the icon permanently mocking me in my Switch library.

So I broke down, and bought a physical copy.  The idea was, if it was the same level of pain I could at least sell it.

(And, technically, I am a little lax on my no-physical-games rule when it comes to Switch.  I have about a dozen, mostly Japanese imports and of course Ring Fit Adventure.)

It turned out that, yes, the remake is VERY different from the unforgiving original:

And maybe even a little TOO easy.  The “Easy” mode not only gives you unlimited lives – which is good – but also makes it so you can take 15 hits before losing a life, compared to three hits in the Normal mode.  I played through the first couple of levels like this and was starting to feel a little sheepish about it, then tested it and found that it was a toggle.  You can swap difficulties after any level, meaning that I could restart in Normal mode, play up to the level that stymied me years before (Volkan Inferno), go back to Easy mode, brute force my way through it after many many deaths and then go back to Normal mode to keep going.

It turned out that, barring Volkan Inferno, the game really isn’t that bad!  I was able to get through the majority of levels after that point only losing 1 or 2 lives per level, though I did have one more difficulty spike waiting for me when I hit the Kingdom of Sorrow level.

This is pretty late in the level.  I’d started the level with something like 45 lives saved, and I still had 37 when I got to this point.  This single platforming challenge was the biggest contributor to losing a total of 17 lives clearing this level.

Fortunately, this is followed by a relatively easy level, and then the final boss.

At this point, I’ll quote the highest-rated Klonoa 2 guide on gamefaqs here:

“Well, this is it. The big end-boss. Kinda disappointing, wasn’t as tough as I hoped he was. However, I’m sure he’ll offer a challenge that hasn’t played a ton of games like myself. Good luck.”

In total, the “kinda disappointing” end boss ate 22 of those carefully-conserved lives.  I hesitate to consider what a less-disappointing boss would have done to me.  Also, my hat’s off to you, Mr. or Ms. Raging_DemonTEN.

Anyway, it’s done now and I feel a sense of deep satisfaction.  I’m glad this got the chance to live again through a remake, though apparently it sold about as well as any Klonoa game ever does so we are unlikely to see any future entries in the series ever.

A bittersweet ending for gaming’s Best Boy.

 

 

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

Moar Diarblo!

Posted on May 2, 2023 by baudattitude

Getting this out of the way first: Diablo 3 marks the second time ever that I have finished a game and then immediately played it a second time, with the first being Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly.  That’s pretty high praise, so you may assume that I liked D3 quite a bit – particularly since I had to buy the game a second time to do it!

Fortunately, buying the “comes with everything” Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition version was only $19.79 on PSN thanks to the current Spring sale.  If I’d had to drop the full sixty bucks it usually costs, you wouldn’t be reading this article right now.

Getting some basics out of the way, just in case someone finds this blog post in the future and is curious how the save transfer process goes when you are transferring your Diablo 3 characters from the PS3 game to the PS4 game running on a PS5 – it’s pretty simple and Just Works, at least as of May of 2023.  I updated Diablo 3 on the PS3, chose More > Export Save from the main menu, then purchased and downloaded Diablo III on my PS5.  When I launched that for the first time, it asked me if I wanted to import the save, and after doing that my character from the PS3 version was ready to roll.

I do have my PSN account linked to Battle.net, and I suspect that is mandatory. I am NOT, however, a current PS+ subscriber.  So this doesn’t seem to use the PS+ cloud saves to transfer data.

And, while it’s probably not a shock that the PS4 version looks better than the PS3 version, I wasn’t properly prepared for the quality jump.  The PS3 version runs at sub-HD resolutions while the PS4 version runs at a full 4k / 60 fps.  Apparently there is some dynamic resolution if you’re running it on a PS4 Pro but the PS5 can brute force its way past the scaling.

So on a PS5 you get something like 13x the number of pixels and there is scarcely a jagged edge in sight.

Bringing your character over doesn’t bring over story progression, however, and since my goal in moving to the updated version was, at least in part, because I wanted to unlock the Whimsyshire level of D3… well, I had to play through most of the game again.  Specifically I had to get nearly to the end of Act 3 before I could get into the dungeon that dropped the last component needed to make the Staff of Herding.  This is reputedly a 5% drop off a rare spawn in a specific dungeon and takes a lot of time or a lot of luck and…

…well, I am happy to report it only took me three tries.  I’m not sure how I would have felt after ten attempts, or twenty.

Whimsyshire was put in the game as something of a middle finger pointed towards a certain group of Very Online People who were offended by early screenshots of Diablo 3, and that is, admittedly, part of why I wanted to play it myself.

Turning pink unicorns into bloody chunks of pink unicorn also made me grin like a maniac in a way that should probably have me on a list somewhere, assuming I’m not already on the list.

Anyway.  Unlocking Whimsyshire took me very nearly to the end of Act 3, and getting there was VERY quick considering I’d imported an end-game character so it seemed appropriate to push on.

Completing the remainder of Act 3, then Act 4 to finish out where the PS3 game had ended, and then Act 5 which was the “Reaper of Souls” expansion took only a few hours and left me feeling very satisfied.  I don’t play many games where you feel like an unstoppable absolute badass at the end of the story, and this definitely scratched that itch.

Posted in ps3, PS4, PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

Diarblo

Posted on April 30, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s been nearly sixteen years since the last time I tried playing any games in the “Diablo” series, and my attempt back in 2007 to get into the first game ended pretty abruptly.  I couldn’t get on with the controls and even for the time the graphics were pretty dated.

To be 100% clear here, I realize that many people hold the Diablo “mouse click to do everything” controls near and dear to their hearts, and while your ways baffle and disturb me I’m not going to try to talk you out of it.  You’re slightly better than people who invert the Y-axis for first-person games, at least.

Now that I’ve managed to insult probably half the people who will ever see this, let’s move on to roughly 2018, when I decided that I was going to give “Destiny” a try.  By this time, Activision really wanted everyone to be playing Destiny 2 and I had to go out to an actual store to buy a physical copy of the original game… which was easily found in the “$5, or 4 for $10” bin at the nearest GameStop.

The other games I picked out of the bin included the original release of Diablo III for PS3, since I’d heard that the controls on console were much easier to deal with.

5 years after THAT, well.

I figured I’d give it a go.

To be clear, this is probably the worst possible way to play this game.  The PS3 and Xbox 360 were very much on their last legs in 2013, and Diablo III plays in a sub-HD resolution that euphemistically “targets 60 fps”.

It ain’t pretty.

Oh, and neither are any of my screenshots.  The PS3 didn’t have a built-in screenshot feature and when I tried to hook it up to a capture card I discovered that it has HDCP permanently turned on.  All pictures, therefore, are literal screenshots.

Anyway, while I understand that the campaign mode is somewhat dismissed as a glorified tutorial, I started up a character and spent the next few days turning low polygon demons into glorious piles of color coded loot drops.

And I will admit, this game makes the experience of Making The Numbers Go Up a very pleasant experience.  You get to put your new drops up against your old gear and say things like “well it’s 3 more intelligence but do I really want to lose that 4% crit damage?”

Some choices are easier than others, of course.  Also the vocabulary in this game!  Like, I am an AD&D kid from the 1970s so I am perfectly comfortable with the odd glaive-guisarme, but what the HECK is a “poignard” ?

I suspect someone, possibly many someones at Blizzard go to a lot of ren faires.  I would say something like “I’m not judging” but that would be a lie.

One of the best touches of the whole loot thing is the times you get an orange legendary-quality item and you get to hold down a button while the game “identifies” it and the anticipation builds and builds and then you find that you have looted magical fart pants.

LEGENDARY magical fart pants.

Sadly D3 does not have any sort of cosmetic item appearance change option, like WoW’s Transmog feature.  My demon-vanquishing wizard went through most of the game looking like this, or worse:

It’s probably a good thing that most of the action is extremely zoomed out.

As a side note, I usually play as melee-heavy tanky sorts of characters in any RPG, since spell casters are traditionally sort of glass cannons and I am bad about not getting hit.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game lets you recruit a companion, in my case the very tanky and also healy Templar character, and he did a fine job of keeping monsters from eating my face while I turned them into ash.

My only regret is that the PS3 version of the game never got the patch that increased the spawn rate of the rare monster that drops the rare drop that lets you get into the Secret Rainbow Pony Level.  I think there’s a way to transfer your characters from PS3 to PS4, however, so I suspect my $2.50 purchase is about to turn into $22.50 overall.

For now though, this is like only the third or fourth game I’ve finished this year and it’s nice to actually see some end credits roll.

Posted in ps3, videogames | Leave a comment

OK. macOS Live Text is pretty mental.

Posted on April 23, 2023 by baudattitude

So, recently I have been trying to “cloudify” pretty much everything I can.  The idea is that the computer hardware I’m using is secondary to the data present, and I should be able to go to any device I own and have access to the same, well, STUFF.

I am, of course, keeping local backups because I’m not 100% an idiot.

One of the things that I was most reluctant to move over to cloud-based storage was my music library.  I tried Apple’s “iTunes Match” service several years ago, and it wasn’t exactly perfect at the time with quite a few mismatched songs.

In 2023 it seems better about song matching.  I checked all of the songs I could remember it messing up previously and they were all OK this time.

There’s just one problem, and it only affected 17 songs in my library, but it was an annoyance:

A number of songs I bought from the Japanese iTunes Store, mostly between 2007 and 2010, were copy protected AND didn’t exist on the iTunes Store server any more.  So it was both unable to upload the songs (because copy protection) and couldn’t match them to song masters in Apple’s library (because expired licenses maybe?).

So I couldn’t get these into iTunes Match.  I did a little searching and found that the universally-agreed-upon solution was very low-tech and consisted of burning them to a CD and then re-importing them.  Obviously there’s a generational loss there, but I’m getting older and my ears aren’t getting any better.

Burning them to a CD was easy enough, after I rummaged through some boxes in my garage and found a single 80-minute CD-R blank.  The Mac I use for the Japanese iTunes Store is a 2009 MacBook Pro that actually has an optical drive in it, and I was able to hook up an external optical to my M1 Mac mini to import the music.

Naturally, iTunes had no idea what the track names or artists were, etc, and I was not looking forward to manually entering all this information.

Now.  Apple introduced a feature back in macOS Monterey called “Live Text” which lets you copy and paste text out of pictures.  I knew this was a thing, and I’ve even occasionally used it.  But how good WAS it, really?

Well.

I took a screenshot of the CD burn screen on the MacBook.

I copied this screenshot over to the other Mac.

I moused over the kanji.

I hit command-C and command-V into the artist field, and it pasted as “避坂大河（釘宮理恵），※枝実乃梨（堀江由衣）＆ 川崎亜美（喜多村英梨）”

So, I’ve been using computers for over 40 years and there have been very few times when I have had my mind absolutely blown by something they can do that I thought was impossible.  The first time I can really remember that happening was the first time I saw Wolf3d in motion, and it has remained a high water mark despite being a 30-year-old memory.

But this, THIS is black magic of the highest order.

Also it made filling out all the metadata on these tracks extremely easy, and I am happy to report that I now have access to all of these via iTunes Match.

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In which, I am stalked by a gadget.

Posted on April 15, 2023 by baudattitude

I recently realized I had a number of devices that supported WiFi 6, and did not have a WiFi 6 access point. Naturally, THIS COULD NOT STAND.

I bought this:

It’s a UniFi Access Point U6 LR,  and it’s obviously not in its final location at this point, but I needed to hook it up and test it.

The “LR” stands for Long Range, which means that I may be able to cover the entire house with a single access point, and also means that it requires a 30W PoE injector rather than the 15W PoE injectors I had already so I needed to spend even more money and then wait for the new one to arrive.

Fortunately, that didn’t take TOO long and the UniFi controller picked the new AP up as soon as it was connected to Ethernet, applied a firmware update and then adopted it into my network.

That’s when I looked at the list of WiFi clients, got vaguely annoyed that MOST of them were simply showing up as MAC addresses, and started trying to track them down and give them friendly names. This wasn’t a serious problem when it came to phones and computers, and even game systems make their MAC address reasonably easy to find. It got trickier when I was trying to label Google Nest speakers, but I eventually labeled all of those, and my Geeni smart plugs, and the TV…

…but there were still two devices showing up, identified only by their MAC address. To make things more frustrating, while MAC addresses are SUPPOSED to be registered to vendors, these ones weren’t coming up in any of my searches.

Moreover, both of them were connecting as WiFi 4 devices, which I thought meant that they were pretty old, but I changed my WiFi password not too long ago and that should have disconnected any older devices.

I fumed a bit and started turning things on to see if they were using a WiFi connection in standby. Still couldn’t find it. On the plus side, if and when I turn on either of our Vitas they now have friendly names assigned.

I even started unplugging things to see if I could get either device to disappear. No joy. I was starting to consider turning off circuits at the breaker panel.

I took a second look at the devices. One of them was staying resolutely connected to a single AP, but the other was roaming like crazy, switching between all three of my APs, almost as if

as if it were following me

I looked at my wrist. I looked at the UniFi controller. I turned off WiFi on my WATCH. Mystery Device #1 disappeared from the console. My wife was sitting in the living room reading something, and had beeen doing that for some time. I asked her to turn off WiFi on HER watch and Mystery Device #2 immediately disappeared as well.

So, I’m not going to say that was time particularly well-spent but now I will be able to look at the admin page for my Ubiquiti devices and know what every one of them is.  That’s something!

Also, Apple: please register the MAC addresses used by your watches with one of the applicable governing bodies.  When you get a spare minute.  Thanks.

 

Posted in gadgets, iOS | Leave a comment

I’ve escaped gacha idol hell.

Posted on April 3, 2023 by baudattitude

OK. It’s inaccurate to say I’ve “escaped” gacha idol hell, because I didn’t really escape it. After 9 years of service, the plug got pulled on Love Live: School Idol Festival, sending all of my hard-earned idol .pngs to a black hole.

And when I say “a black hole”, I really mean it. See, while the makers of Love Live: School Idol Festival are offering a transfer service that takes all of the cards you collected and adds them to an album in the sequel game, this service was only available to players of the North American or Japanese versions of the game. Players of the European version weren’t eligible to transfer, probably due to some sort of contract nonsense.

…did I say “Players of the European version”? I’m sorry, I meant “anyone who ever logged on to the game while they were in Europe”. So the week I spent in Brussels and France back in 2019 meant that I was not eligible to transfer my stuff to the new game… something that’s both bad and good. While it means that I don’t get to flip through my virtual idols like the baseball cards of my childhood, it also means that I don’t feel driven to download the new game once it comes out.

That isn’t to say that I won’t try it. Love Live: School Idol Festival was a supremely fun game, and looking at my play stats on its final day of service revealed that I had logged into it on 1159 unique days since installing it in January of 2018. That is a LOT of play time.

Also, over the course of five years, I spent about sixty bucks total on it – and most of that was just because I wanted particularly pretty cards, not because I needed them to play the game. As far as a free-to-play game goes, it was EXCEPTIONALLY generous with the amount you could play and the amount of currency that was thrown at you to draw for random characters.

So, on the last day, I logged in, played one final song – START:DASH!! – and took a few screenshots to remember it by.

Here are some of my favorite cards, selected because they were really pretty:

Yes I may have a little bit of a Nozomi bias. BEST GIRL.

And one very special card to me for how broken it was:

This particular Kotori card had a special ability that the game developers added to exactly three cards ever and then never ever put on a card ever again. It was simple enough in theory: Every time you got a certain amount of score, Kotori would give you a little more score. I think that it was something like getting a 200 point bonus every time you got 1800 points. Nothing huge, right?

Well, you could have multiple Kotoris in a team. And if you were playing one of LLSIF’s team events, Kotori’s “add score” would fire on the team’s score rather than just your score. And it would activate for every Kotori in your hand. The end result was rather explosive, and the score counter would keep scrolling for quite a while after a song ended just to update with your final score.

Let’s not talk about her giant, nightmare-inducing syringe. Some people have very particular fetishes.

Anyway. It was an awesome game, it’s dead now, I’m a little sad but life goes on.

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Lore-abiding citizen

Posted on January 9, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s been about a month since I posted about WoW’s latest expansion, Dragonflight, and at the time I was pretty positive about the whole thing.  I’m actually still quite positive about it!  It’s a little less metaphysical than the Shadowlands expansion, which was all about the afterlife and redemption and uh…

I’ve mostly forgotten really.  There were some delightfully wicked little fairies in it and then we went off to discover that all of the various afterlives were actually constructed by some sort of spiritual Magrathea and then the big evil guy of the expansion turned out to be a construct himself and honestly I doubt they are ever going to come back to this storyline ever.

And that’s truly a shame because the expansion included the Best NPC ever, voiced by Aysha Selim, and I desperately want to know what her Whole Deal was.

Dragonflight is much less abstract.  There are some good dragons and there are some bad dragons and the bad dragons drop loot and that’s all I need to know.

…well, that’s all I usually need to know.  For some reason I got really into running around and actually doing all of the side storylines and got my first “Loremaster” achievement since 2016’s Legion expansion.  This is an achievement you get for walking up to literally everyone you can find with an exclamation mark over their head and doing whatever they tell you to do.

Most of the side quests are pretty enjoyable and my only quibble with them is that a couple of them send you into my least favorite instanced dungeon in the entire expansion.  This is very unusual for Loremaster achievements, as I understand, since the achievements in previous expansions have largely been doable without grouping.

I elected to get around the requirement by being overgeared and a tank and doing the dungeon solo.  This took longer than doing it the “right way” would have, but I enjoyed being able to set my pace and not being responsible for leading a group, which is an experience roughly equivalent to trying to herd four kittens all chasing different laser pointers.

The whole questing experience is also made considerably nicer by the dragon riding system.  The last few WoW expansions have disabled flight at the beginning of each expansion, which is (a) a way for the developers to make you actually ride around their carefully-crafted areas on foot so you can really appreciate the work they put in on them and (b) has the side effect of slowing you down quite a bit so you can’t chew through everything the expansion has to offer in the first week.  Being able to fly to and from quest objectives has made getting around an absolute joy by comparison.

I actually have another post I’d like to write talking about how the loot system in Dragonflight is also a considerable upgrade, but that’s going to be boring and full of numbers.  I’ll leave off here for now.

 

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming | 1 Comment

In which I shoot myself in the foot, and then fix it with a shell script.

Posted on December 14, 2022 by baudattitude

I don’t make a secret out of my long-running MMO habit, at least on this blog.  I tend not to mention it in polite circles, because an MMO habit is one step above admitting that you are a heroin enthusiast, but nothing about the internet is particularly polite.

My policy of late has been to drop MMOs at the point where I realize that I am simply logging on to Make The Numbers Bigger, and not because I am enjoying the game or the people I play with.  I do tend to keep a bunch of screenshots around, however, so I can occasionally go back and look through them to remember when these were cutting edge graphics:

Everquest’s sharks were prone to transcending their watery limitations, at least in the early days.

One slight problem is that I tend to get a ton of screenshots after a while, and if I move from device to device to play on then the screenshots tend to get jumbled up and out of order.  One way to work around this is to toss them all in a directory and sort it by date.

Except.

Recently, I was working to clear documents and pictures off a couple of Windows PCs, and did so by uploading everything to iCloud Drive and then deleting it from the PCs.  I did not realize that one of the TINY INCONSEQUENTIAL QUIRKS of iCloud Drive on a PC is that it updates the time/date stamp on the file to the date uploaded.

So this is what a folder of screenshots from FFXIV looked like:

OK, so.  This is less than optimal, but there’s still timestamp information. It’s just in the file names rather than the metadata. Surely I can work with this.

So after a fair bit of hard work browsing StackExchange, I came up with this.  No guarantees that this will work for anyone other than me. I stole most of it from other people without properly understanding what they were doing.

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# fixdates
# reads dates in filenames and tries to set the file date from the date stamp in the name
#
# character replacement stolen from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2871181/replacing-some-characters-in-a-string-with-another-character
# dash escape stolen from https://superuser.com/questions/528162/how-to-escape-in-bash
# relies on all single digit days and months having leading 0s.


for filename in *.*
do
	# Set up our variables
	year="2000"
	month="01"
	day="01"
	hour="12"
	minute="00"
	second="00"
	fulldate="20000101"
	fulltime="000000"
	filegood=0
	
	# drop the extension.  May break with filenames with multiple periods?
	filenamenoext=${filename%.*}

	# drop dashes
	filenamenodash=$(echo $filenamenoext | tr -d "-")

	# replace underscores with spaces
	filenamespaced=$(echo $filenamenodash | tr _ " ")
		
	# this will replaces both dashes and underscores but let's leave that aside for now:
	# filenamespaced=$(echo $filenamenoext | tr -- -_ " ")
	# and yes the -- is important since it says "there are no more options after this point, treat the dash you're about to see as a character"
	
	# break the extensionless filename into components by space
	
	read -ra filenamearray <<<"$filenamespaced"
	
	for i in "${filenamearray[@]}"
	do
		itemsize=${#i}
		if [ "$itemsize" == "8" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ]; # cheap way to check if something is a number
		then
			fulldate=${i}
			((filegood++)) # we have a date, touch is go
		fi
		if [ "$itemsize" == "6" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ];
		then
		# we have a time? probably
			fulltime=${i}
		fi
		if [ "$itemsize" == "14" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ];
		then
#			This looks like date and time in one string.
#			We're going to assume date first because otherwise is madness
			fulldate=${i:0:8}
			fulltime=${i:8:6}
			((filegood++))
		fi
	done

	if (( filegood == 1 )); # We think we at least have a date
	then
		if [ "${fulldate:4:2}" == "19" ] || [ "${fulldate:4:2}" == "20" ];
		then
			year="${fulldate:4:4}"
			month="${fulldate:0:2}"
			day="${fulldate:2:2}"
		else
			year="${fulldate:0:4}"
			month="${fulldate:4:2}"
			day="${fulldate:6:2}"
		fi
		hour="${fulltime:0:2}"
		minute="${fulltime:2:2}"
		second="${fulltime:4:2}"
	touch -d "$year"-"$month"-"$day"T"$hour":"$minute":"$second" "$filename"
	else
	echo "Bad file (Couldn't find anything that looks like a date):" "$filename"
	fi
done

And this, for the time being, seems to work and I have my screenshots back to the proper times and dates.

Also, it’s generic enough that it worked for files with their time stamps in the following formats:

gsdx_20170411131943.bmp
Kandagawa Jet Girls 2022-05-23 23-24-14.mp4
ffxiv_09242015_191807.png

But there’s little to be done for uPlay unless I massage the filenames manually first or figure out how to parse the entire string for “2019” or “2020” and then extract the date from that point and add leading zeros to the single-digit entries and… look, Ubisoft, would it have killed you to write your dates in a little more sensible manner?

Assassin's Creed® Unity2019-4-17-15-33-0.png
Tom Clancy's The Division® 22019-10-4-2-25-9.jpg

Also a space between the game title and the date would have been cool.

But gosh dang it, I have the world’s hugest sense of satisfaction right now.

Posted in shell scripts | Leave a comment

World of Warcraft: How to Main Your Dragon

Posted on December 11, 2022 by baudattitude

So, the latest World of Warcraft expansion came out a couple of weeks ago, right when I was supposed to be studying for the JLPT. So I didn’t get very far into it until after the test.

Now that I have… it’s pretty good? I think I like it?

For context, I have to admit that Warcraft Lore is one of my weakest points as a nerd. I never played any of the RTS games and I’ve only played WoW during a couple of more recent expansions. So my experience with WoW has included a lot of times where I’m following a storyline and then there’s a Very Dramatic Cutscene where SUDDENLY SOMEONE APPEARS and I’m like, huh, everyone seems very shocked by this.

Sometime the unexpected guest, or guests, turn out to be dragons, and that’s the case with Dragonflight. But, you know, these are good dragons and very rarely eat people.

WoW seems to have a lot of good dragons, and bad dragons, and my wife who has played far more of the game and read far more of the supplemental material is very up-to-date on which is which and which dragons are GOOD dragons BUT had dads that were total jerks. This is different from my typical approach to dragons, which is to ask whether I need frost or fire resist gear.

Anyway.

The previous WoW expansion was set entirely in the afterlife, and consisted of a storyline where you marshaled your forces to fight back an evil, but extremely hot, vampire daddy and then found out that he was JUST A PAWN AND THE REAL VILLAIN was…

…was…

…was super boring by comparison. Like, they made one charismatic villain and peaked.

Thankfully, the dungeons were top class and kept me coming back time and again. Except you, Plaguefall. You get to sit in the Bad Dungeon Corner and think about what you did.

So after that, your characters come back to the Real World and presumably have a very hard time convincing everyone that you saved the world again because it’s not like anyone on Azeroth actually saw hot vampire daddy. But hey, champagne all around, except now there are evil dudes running all over Azeroth summoning elementals which is a fair less metaphysical sort of danger.

It turns out that these guys are trying to bring about the rebirth of some evil bad dragons who we’ve never heard of before because there was a war with the good dragons like a super long time ago and the good dragons won but they didn’t want to kill the really bad dragons so they just imprisoned them because good is dumb.

I’ve already forgotten why this is any of my concern as a non-dragon. It would have helped if one of them had just come clean and said something along the lines of

“Look, we may be immortal flame breathing lizards the size of a greyhound bus but we could really use some help from you puny mortals. We’ll let you keep anything you get off their bodies. Do we have a deal?”

Mind you, the raid zone where you do this hasn’t opened for business yet, so everyone is just running around the world and doing all of the other stuff you can do, which includes a pretty bitchin’ dragon flight simulator and storylines revolving around the day to day challenges of Centaurs and Walrus dudes and how you puny humans can make their lives easier, one quest at a time, in exchange for 40 to 60 gold and possibly a new pair of shoes.

There are some Bad Centaurs to go with the Bad Dragons, as an aside. All of the Walrus dudes seem pretty chill, though.

If you’ve done enough chores and want to get into some five-man instanced content, the expansion has eight dungeons at launch. I’ve run all of them at least once and there don’t seem to be any real stinkers. None of them seem quite as fun as Shadowland’s De Other Side, but maybe they’ll grow on me.

Dragonflight also brings the game’s first new class in quite a while, the Evoker.  Evokers are limited to a single race, which is also the game’s first new race in a couple of expansions, and there are a LOT of Evokers running around right now.  The evoker class can choose between healing and DPS specializations, so if you like to play tanks in MMOs and liked being in demand before, you may find the added popularity either welcome or overwhelming.

Also roughly half of my WoW guild has switched over to Evoker mains for the upcoming raiding and mythic season.  So I am predicting a lot of drama around mail armor.  I will be continuing to play a Paladin and ignoring the entire issue.

For anyone masochistic enough to do crafting in a MMO, WoW did a pretty comprehensive overall of the crafting system. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around it, but my impression is that it seems less awful than FFXIV’s crafting, but not as good as EQ2’s crafting. It definitely promises payoff for people who deep dive into it, but it also lets you invest deeply into specific crafting specialties with no way to reset them should you suddenly realize you’ve made huge mistakes.

Also there’s PVP for those who want it, even if the Horde and Alliance officially have a truce now. I did a lot of that in Shadowlands, but don’t feel like doing any more of it in Dragonflight. Presumably it’s less of a hot unbalanced mess early in an expansion launch cycle, so getting in on that now is likely going to be the best time for it.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that I’m suited to review an MMO expansion, or even that doing so in its first month is a good idea. But Dragonflight seems good so far and if you’ve liked WoW in the past, but fell off with Shadowlands, I think you’d enjoy this one. It also wouldn’t be an awful place to start playing, since you get to level from 1 through 60 in the fairly down-to-earth Battle for Azeroth expansion and then go right into Dragonflight without any weird detours to alternate dimensions.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment