Brand Disloyalty

Posted on November 22, 2020 by baudattitude

So, in the fifteen years or so since I bought my first modern Macintosh (a first-gen Intel Mac mini), our house has turned into a bit of an Apple Shrine.  We have four Macs, an iPhone each, a few iPads, a couple of AppleTVs and even a pair of HomePods, which are Apple’s entry into the “smart speaker” marketplace.

So why do I have THREE Google Nest Minis?

My attempt at a product glamor shot.  Ceramic cat for scale.

Well, it’s a long story that started when Google decided to send one of these things to all of their YouTube Music subscribers.  I signed up for that service ages ago when it was Google Play Music, mostly to get rid of ads on YouTube, and I’ve maintained my subscription because I’m grandfathered in at a low rate and I watch a lot of YouTube and hate ads.

I didn’t see a ton of point to the thing, but I plugged it in so my wife could use it as a bluetooth speaker for her phone.  It’s actually not very good at that as the phone and speaker kept getting unsynced.  She has a newer phone now and they may work better together but we haven’t tried.

Anyway, since it wasn’t a great bluetooth speaker it mostly sat plugged in on an end table doing… nothing, really.  Listening, I guess.  Always listening.  We kind of forgot we had the thing.

It’s critical to note at this point that we don’t have a clock in our living room and that at one point my wife asked me what time it was and I didn’t have my phone handy so I said “OK, Google, what time is it?” and it told us the time and suddenly it had a purpose.

Then I discovered that this freebie speaker was better at answering basic questions than Siri.  Like, if you ask Siri “What time does Target close?” there are a lot of extraneous words before she finally tells you what Target’s hours are. And she tells you the hours, like “opens at 7 am and closes at 11 PM” which is not technically the answer to the question.

Google, on the other hand, says “Target at (address of closest Target) closes at 11 PM tonight”

And then we bought a new smart TV for our living room and the two devices talked to each other and suddenly I could tell the TV to turn on while I was walking into the room while carrying food… and then we discovered that we had quite a few other things, like Xboxes, that could integrate with this free little speaker. So that was kind of neat.

Furthermore, since I DO have a subscription to YouTube Music, it has been invaluable at times, like when I discovered that my wife had never heard EITHER of Golden Earring’s hit songs and I was able to subject her to roughly 30 seconds each of “Radar Love” and “Twilight Zone” before she told me to stop that and never do it again lest I wind up having a smart speaker lobbed at my head.

Then, I was in Walmart and saw these things.

They’re nothing more than crazy cheap Google-compatible switched plugs, but they are crazy cheap.  Like, under nine dollars each.

And also extra Google Nest Minis were only $29 each.

So, I bought two more of them and three of these smart plugs and we’ve got them hooked up to lights in places like the bedroom so we don’t have to worry about the moment between turning off the light and getting into bed which is when the cat likes to dash directly between us and the bed, and we have a house that is, for some definitions of the phrase, a “Smart Home” even though that usually conjures up images of people who have, for some reason, decided that their doorbell needs to rely on wi-fi connectivity.

We are very far from that.

And it has all come together for less than the price of a single HomePod Mini*, which is Apple’s attempt to enter the low end of the smart speaker market.

I don’t have any regrets about owning the HomePods, mind you – they are fantastic-sounding speakers even if Siri is a little slow, and handoff is black magic with how seamlessly it works – but Google’s got something pretty impressive going on here.

* Technically only because one of the nest minis was free.  Otherwise it would be slightly more.

 

Posted in gadgets | 2 Comments

Apple TV for consoles is here, and it’s …eh.

Posted on November 15, 2020 by baudattitude

So, I’ve had an AppleTV of one sort or another for a bit over eleven years now.  The very first model, basically a stripped-down Mac Mini in a squashed box, was purely a way to rent movies from iTunes and get content in your iTunes library to show up on your TV.  It was quickly replaced with a much smaller and slightly-more-capable model that added streaming services, and there have been revisions and iterations that have brought it up to a quite capable 4k streamer with some light gaming chops.

Oh, and it still lets you show the content in your iTunes library on your TV.  I have a tremendous amount of personally-ripped media and have spent way too much time organizing and tagging it.

Last year, of course, Apple introduced their own streaming service.  Personally, I haven’t had much (any) use for it, but it’s meant that they have started allowing some non-Apple devices access to iTunes Store content.  Up until now, that’s basically been a few smart TVs… but, with the launch of the new consoles, Apple has finally broken down and released their Apple TV app for boxes that people actually own.

I downloaded the PS4 and Xbone apps and took them for a quick spin.  Screenshots below are mostly from the PS4 version, but the two look identical.  Also, these were taken with a camera because the app disables the in-OS screenshot options so they’re not particularly high-quality pictures.

Watch Now is intended to be the home screen for the Apple TV app, basically showing you your most-recently-purchased-or-played videos.

So, the app LOOKS like the same app when run off a hardware Apple TV, but there are some differences.  On an Apple TV, if you launch a movie with iTunes Extras, it takes you to a menu where you can select the extras or start the movie.  If you’re mid-movie, you get the choice to resume from the last playback position or start from the beginning.  On the consoles, you can’t access the iTunes Extras and the movie just starts playing from whatever point you left off.  If that happens to be in the middle of a movie, you need to press B or Circle to choose to start the movie from the beginning.

The playback interface is barebones as all get out, and essentially uses the D-pad on the controller to emulate the touchpad on the Apple TV remote.  So, to turn subtitles on or change audio, you press down on the D-pad.  Perfectly intuitive!

Also, A / X to pause.  The Start/Options buttons do nothing.

You can also use the D-pad to scrub forwards or backwards 10 seconds at a time.

If you’re controlling your PS4 with a HDMI-CEC compatible remote, you can use that instead of the controller.  That’s one definite point in its favor over the Xbone version.

Does the Xbox Series S|X support HDMI-CEC? I should probably research that.

Anyway.

Library view shows you your purchased content. I have bought over five hundred movies from the iTunes Store over the years, and a fair amount of TV.  That’s probably more than most people, and almost certainly more than they tested the console app with, because trying to browse through the library on the PS4 has invariably resulted in, well…

Is it still a “Blue Screen of Death” if it’s not on Windows?

For the record, you can scroll through your library without issues on the Xbone app.  It’s just the PS4 app that has problems for me.

Oddly enough, “purchasing” the app on the Xbone has a weird bit of language that I’m assuming is just a typo, since as far as I can tell there IS no Windows 10 version of the Apple TV app.

Maybe it’s planned for the future?

Finally, there’s no way to access local iTunes libraries.  That’s unfortunate, but kind of expected.

So… short version, it’s a way to get Apple streaming on TVs using the game console you probably already own, but the experience is not really great yet.

Posted in movies & tv, PS4, Xbox One | Leave a comment

On Green Bars

Posted on November 13, 2020 by baudattitude

So, no posts here in ages and it would be kind of embarrassing if the last thing I wrote was a tediously boring bit about extracting audio tracks from mkv files. Instead, let’s have a tediously boring rant about healing in MMOs.

I played a lot – and I hesitate to think about how much “a lot” means, here – of Final Fantasy 14 last year and early this year, and if I were recommending an MMO to anyone curious about the genre it would still probably be FFXIV. It’s probably the most heavily story-driven MMO on the market, to the point of having different quest icons for “GO HERE FOR MORE PLOT” and “GO HERE IF YOU JUST WANNA KILL TEN RATS”, and I have developed a genuine fondness for the game’s characters over the course of several expansions’ worth of storylines.

However.

If you like playing healing classes – and I do! – it is not exactly the most exciting thing.

Very little of FFXIV’s player damage is random. If you’re fighting a boss that casts a big AE nuke 90 seconds into the encounter, you know that boss will always cast the big AE nuke at 90 seconds, you know to save your “heal everyone back to full” spell for 91 seconds into the encounter, and the 89 seconds prior to that are spent spamming damage spells at the boss. In the worst examples, you know in advance that the four DPS players in the group – and only the four DPS players – are about to be afflicted with a status effect that needs to be cured off or that they need to run away from the group. There’s no need to adjust for “what happens if this lands on a tank or healer?” because the game is scripted to make it always hit players in particular roles.

In addition, most late-game encounters in FFXIV have rigid time limits. There is no outhealing a party-wide instant-death attack that is going to occur eleven minutes after the boss is engaged.

The end result is that healers in FFXIV are usually reacting to very predictable damage and are expected to be nuking 90% of the time to help prevent running into that “you took too long, everyone dies” attack.

By contrast, I have been playing a little bit of WoW recently because both my wife and I were in a WoW mood and it’s a good thing when we’re both playing the same game at the same time.

Now, WoW has some serious issues. It’s creaking with age and it really doesn’t feel like Blizzard particularly has its heart in pumping out new content, and the graphical style is… well, it’s not going back to 1999 EQ levels of bad, but it’s definitely stylized in a way that is a bit marmite.

BUT.

Healing is marvelously chaotic.

Just look at all of those green bars, at various levels of “healthy” to “not doing so hot”, and imagine that you have a few healing tools to choose from and need to decide which character is at risk of dying if you don’t use the fast, mana-hog heal and which can live long enough for your bigger, more mana-efficient heal to land.

Oh, and there are like half a dozen different healing specs and they all have different tool sets with obvious shortages. I the last time I played WoW, I was playing as priest, and got used to having shields, heal-over-time spells, group heals, just a marvelous toolbox to counter the minor drawback of basically being made out of tissue paper.

This time, I’ve been playing a “Holy” Paladin, and it has great single-player heals but suffers tremendously in any situation where there’s a lot of AE damage… but I also have the ability to put an invulnerability bubble on a character who is about to otherwise eat floorboards, which my priest character never had. There are also druid and shaman healers, all of which seem viable but have their own weaknesses.

FFXIV has White Mages and … the other two healers, who kind of struggle to find identity. Scholar is an “anticipate damage and put shields on the person who is about to take damage” class, and Astrologians are just kind of … there. I don’t know much about them and rarely grouped with them. They’ve avoided adding healing classes past these three.

Furthermore,

Now you’ve lost a few people. The boss obviously isn’t dead yet. It would be good to have someone resurrect those players back into the fight, BUT… in-combat resurrections are incredibly limited in WoW and need to be used strategically. If the raid uses up one of its rezzes on a dead DPS player and the off tank goes down, there may not be a rez available for him.

Obviously, every MMO handles the question of mid-combat resurrections differently. EQ1 had its five-minutes resurrection sickness, which made sense because boss fights in that could last upwards of a half hour, EQ2 has its mechanic where the boss heals 4% of its life every time a character dies, FFXIV lets you bring back players without limits but you are still facing that encounter timer… You could argue the good and bad points of either, but I am currently appreciating WoW’s approach to it.

The end result is that, for all the things that Blizzard could be doing SO MUCH BETTER, if you want a Green Bar Filling Strategy Game, they have that in spades.

Anyway. Probably not the best post to come back from a long hiatus with, but I wasn’t quite ready to let this blog shuffle off into nothingness quite yet.

Posted in MMORPG, videogames | 1 Comment

Editing Audio and Subtitle Tracks in .mkv Files with ffmpeg

Posted on September 25, 2020 by baudattitude

I have been trying to consolidate a bunch of servers recently, and one of the ones that I am looking to sunset is a box that has been used as a BD ripping and media encoding box.  The reason it HASN’T been sunset yet is that, well, there are a bunch of things on it that have been ripped but not yet encoded for playback on an AppleTV and I needed to get on that.

Anyway, that’s in process, and I was deleting a bunch of source files that had already been encoded and that’s when I ran across Maken-Ki.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s a really forgettable show whose chief draw is a violent pettanko who may or may not be a dragon.  I kind of regret watching both seasons of it, and I am very unlikely to ever watch it again, but finding the source files made me remember something about the series that had REALLY annoyed me; which was a frustrating typo in the subtitles in one of the episodes.

So I thought to myself, how hard could this be to fix?  I’ve got ffmpeg, which is like a Swiss army knife on steroids when it comes to video file manipulation, I’m sure I can sort it out.

What could possibly go wrong?

My first step was to look at how the original file was laid out, which you can do just by throwing it into ffmpeg, like so:

ffmpeg -i MakenKiS02E08.mkv

And this gives a lot of output:

    Stream #0:0: Video: hevc (Main 10), yuv420p10le(tv), 1920×1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 1k tbn, 23.98 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      _STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: mkvmerge v30.1.0 (‘Forever And More’) 64-bit
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2019-02-10 22:33:00
      BPS-eng         : 2583237
      DURATION-eng    : 00:23:42.046000000
      NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 459185284
      NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 34095

    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC), 48000 Hz, 5.1, fltp (default)
    Metadata:
      title           : English 5.1 channel AAC
      _STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: mkvmerge v30.1.0 (‘Forever And More’) 64-bit
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2019-02-10 22:33:00
      BPS-eng         : 440524
      DURATION-eng    : 00:23:42.036000000
      NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 78305206
      NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 66658

    Stream #0:2(jpn): Audio: aac (LC), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp
    Metadata:
      title           : Japanese 2.0 channel AAC
      _STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: mkvmerge v30.1.0 (‘Forever And More’) 64-bit
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2019-02-10 22:33:00
      BPS-eng         : 179997
      DURATION-eng    : 00:23:42.087000000
      NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 31996579
      NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 66661

    Stream #0:3(zxx): Subtitle: ass (default)
    Metadata:
      title           : Signs/Karaoke [Hatsuyuki] – [WHW]
      _STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: mkvmerge v30.1.0 (‘Forever And More’) 64-bit
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2019-02-10 22:33:00
      BPS-eng         : 470
      DURATION-eng    : 00:23:04.820000000
      NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 81502
      NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 601

    Stream #0:4(eng): Subtitle: ass
    Metadata:
      title           : [Hatsuyuki] – [WHW]
      _STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: mkvmerge v30.1.0 (‘Forever And More’) 64-bit
      _STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2019-02-10 22:33:00
      BPS-eng         : 562
      DURATION-eng    : 00:23:37.210000000
      NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 99571
      NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 897

    Stream #0:5: Attachment: ttf
    Metadata:
      filename        : HeyGorgeous.ttf
      mimetype        : application/x-truetype-font

    Stream #0:6: Attachment: ttf
    Metadata:
      filename        : INCOLHUA_R.ttf
      mimetype        : application/x-truetype-font

I’ve cut a lot out of this because what I want to know about is the Streams, which are all of the different components that make up the video file.  This file has one video stream, two audio streams, two subtitle streams and a bunch of embedded fonts.  I’ve cut off all the fonts after the first couple because the output was already long enough.

The English audio track and the “Signs/Karaoke” subtitle track are unnecessary, so let’s get rid of those first:

ffmpeg -i MakenKiS02E08.mkv -map 0 -map -0:1 -map -0:3 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -scodec copy tt.mkv

Breaking this down:

ffmpeg -i

just tells ffmpeg which file to read.

-map 0

tells it to copy all streams from file 0 to the output file.  ffmpeg starts counting everything from 0.  It’s annoying but you get used to it.  Except, we don’t want the English audio or signs and karaoke subtitles, so we use two more map commands to exclude those.

 "-map -0:1 -map -0:3"

is telling ffmpeg to drop streams 1 and 3 from file 0.

-acodec copy -vcodec copy -scodec copy

tells ffmpeg to copy the remaining audio, video, and subtitle streams without transcoding them.  This is very fast and doesn’t affect quality.

Finally, the last thing on your ffmpeg command line is the filename you want ffmpeg to write to.  “tt.mkv” is just my regular shorthand for temporary output files.

This cheerfully made a new mkv file, and I threw it into VLC to confirm that the subtitles and audio I wanted were present.  It was also 80 megabytes smaller without the English audio so you could use this to reduce the size of mkv files where you don’t care about some of the languages.

Then I needed to separate the subtitle file from the mkv file so I could make changes.

ffmpeg -t tt.mkv -map 0 -map -0:2 -acodec copy -vcodec copy tt_nosubs.mkv

Again I’m using the -map -0:2 command to exclude a stream, in this case the subtitle stream.  This gives me a file with just video, audio, and fonts.

I also extract the subtitle track to a text file with a .ass extension, like so:

ffmpeg -i tt.mkv -scodec copy script.ass

ffmpeg is smart enough to know that you can’t put video or audio into a .ass file so it drops those and we’re left with just the script.

After that, I made my changes to the script and needed to mash it all back into one file.

ffmpeg -i tt_nosubs.mkv -i script.ass -map 0 -map 1 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -scodec copy ttt.mkv

Two -i commands to tell ffmpeg that it needs to read from two input files, two -map commands to tell it to take all streams from file 0 (the mkv file) and all streams from file 1 (the subtitles file), copy them without transcoding and put everything into another file called ttt.mkv.

I am not particularly inventive with my file names.

I was then able to throw ttt.mkv through Handbrake and it gave me a lovely AppleTV-compatible .m4v file that I will probably never actually watch because Maken-Ki was not really worth a second watch, but damnit I fixed the typo and this was very important to me.

Though Himegami – that’s the violent pettanko’s name, had to look it up – WAS a hilarious character and it might be worth watching a couple episodes.  Someday.  When I get through all of the other shows in my queue.

Posted in anime, video encoding | Leave a comment

I Am Afraid of a Certain Number of Ghosts.

Posted on September 9, 2020 by baudattitude

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had celebrated my lack of a games backlog by buying Luigi’s Mansion 3 during the Nintendo eShop sale.  I hadn’t played the first two games in the series, but it looked fun and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive and how often does Nintendo first party stuff go on sale anyway?

Upon starting it, however, and watching the opening cinematic, I was forced to realize that I had many unanswered questions that might hinder my enjoyment of the game.  Like, why does Luigi have a ghost dog? Furthermore, why is Luigi in the ghost catching business in the first place?

Obviously I needed to dip back into the history of the franchise, and that meant spending a couple of evenings playing through his original adventure on the Gamecube, through Dolphin since I wasn’t going to go to the hassle of digging out the original hardware.

As an aside, I hadn’t really ever messed with Dolphin before and it turned out to be a very civilized experience.  Luigi’s Mansion looked very good upscaled to 1080p and could easily have been mistaken for a much more modern game.

In short, I’m glad I did this.  Luigi’s Mansion turned out to be a tremendously charming and enjoyable experience.  At the end of it, I still didn’t know why he now has a ghostly dog but at least I understood the reason behind his one-plumber war on the spectral realm.

Wikipedia says he picked up the dog in the sequel, and I considered playing through that as well… and then I read reviews that mentioned mandatory balancing sections involving motion control and I put that notion right out of my head.

So I’m ready for Luigi’s Mansion 3 and if you are the sort of person who does not like to see any criticism of Nintendo first party titles we will both be happier if you stop reading at this point because I am about to say unkind things about a 19 year old game that was probably a fundamental part of your childhood.

Still with me? Good. Because, man, despite how enjoyable Luigi’s Mansion is, it is basically a showcase for all the worst elements of gaming in the late 90s/early 2000s.

You’ve got your forced-inverted-Y-axis control for aiming up and down, tank controls for horizontal aiming and movement, unstoppable cutscenes even on a repeat viewing, a fixed camera that is usually pretty decent but occasionally decides to be awful, no checkpoints and oh my god the backtracking.  Every time you save and re-enter the game, you have to start from the mansion’s foyer and then slowly walk through several floors to pick up wherever you left off.

Luigi doesn’t regain health when loading a game or after fights, which isn’t really an issue – there’s an easily accessed healing item in a room just a few doors away from the foyer – but walking over to pick that up every time I needed to heal up was (again) more backtracking.  Apparently in the 3DS remake of the game you can heal Luigi if you own the Toad Amiibo, which at least indicates that the remake team realized this was a pain.

There are also no pre-boss checkpoints, so dying to a boss means that you have to load your last game, putting you back in the foyer for an annoying walk back to the boss, where you will watch the pre-fight cutscene again.  The flip side of this is that MOST of the fights are very easy, so the odds of dying to most enemies are very low… and then you get to the fourth and final boss.

Without spoiling the particulars of the fight, the last boss comes out of nowhere in terms of challenge and obtuseness, and I had to finally give up and look up how to damage him after three or four abject failures at the fight.  Once I knew HOW to hit him, it still took several tries to figure out how to bait him into an attack I could punish with a counterattack.  Once I had that down, it wasn’t that bad of a fight but it could seriously have done with a little more telegraphing.

I am very grateful for save states, once I looked up how to use them in Dolphin anyway.  They meant that I could start the boss fight over from the beginning without the load screen -> walk through the mansion -> cutscene sequence every time.

The 3DS version lets you skip the final boss cutscene after the first viewing, by the way.  Another significant quality of life change there.  AND it lets you play with regular Y-axis controls.

What I’m saying is that Luigi’s Mansion is a really fun game and if you have somehow missed it then I quite recommend playing the 3DS version.

 

Posted in gamecube, videogames | Leave a comment

Phantasy Star Online 2

Posted on September 5, 2020 by baudattitude

The final F2P game I’ve been trying out recently is JUST a little larger in scale than the mobile games I talked about over the last couple of days.  Phantasy Star Online 2 is one of those games that was stuck in Japan for ages, with seemingly little hope of a localization, before getting  a surprise drop during last summer’s Xbox E3 presentation.

It didn’t actually launch until April of this year, and it’s taken me a few months to get around to seeing what it’s all about.

I’ll lead with some positives, because there are a lot of nice things to say about this game.  For a start, the character creator let me put together a red-haired pigtailed robot girl with glasses, mahoosive hooters, and a pronounced absolute territory, and that’s just the sort of quality product that I look for.

Also, while individual game zones are fairly tiny – this was a Vita title at one point, after all – the art direction is just designed to make me happy.  Lots of alien worlds and floating islands and glowing sci-fi interiors.  It reminded me of Scarlet Blade in that way, and I’m sure that all three of the other people who played that particular MMO will agree.

The hub zone / base ship.  So much neon.

Floating islands are like the least realistic things ever but so pretty.

Love me some alien ruins.

Also there is a Ye Olde Timey Japanese City zone for reasons?

I didn’t get much into the game’s story missions, but I did play through a bunch of “expeditions” which are fairly linear affairs where you grind through a massive number of random mooks and then face off against a satisfyingly huge boss at the end.

Got a sort of samurai-Oni-thing going on here.

Gotta have dragons.

PSO2 scratches a very real itch, which is the need to beat the hell out of a boss that then explodes into a literal shower of color-coded loot.  This is what I was greeted with at the end of one of the game’s “urgent quest” which are massive multi-stage affairs for a dozen or two people.

I don’t have to share ANY of this loot.  I get it all.

Even smaller-scale bosses have pretty nice lootsplosions:

There’s like four weapons here, a bunch of money, and some skill boosts.  You get to run through it all mashing the “pick up item” button and hear happy little pings as it’s all added to your inventory.

Finally, the combat system is really fun.  It’s action based, so you are dodging around a battlefield paying attention to your character and the enemy rather than staring at a hotbar full of stuff and waiting for it to come off cooldown.  There’s a little bit of skill involved in timing your attacks in combination, and there’s a dodge skill with what feels like a generous helping of iframes.

If you just want to beat the stuffing out of weird and wonderful alien critters and sort through mounds of loot, PSO2 has LOTS to offer.

On the downside, it’s been out for eight years.  There is a huge amount of content, and just a crazy number of systems to try to absorb.  After playing for less than 20 hours, my character’s bank storage was full to bursting with random weapons and items that sure SEEM important but aren’t usable by the “Hunter” class I started with.  They’re probably useful for one of the game’s other 8 classes, and I can choose to level any of those classes at any time, so I should probably hold on to them.

There are also a lot of daily and weekly missions and NPCs standing everywhere asking me to take on vitally-important tasks and it is just a little overwhelming.

In the final analysis, I think it’s a little late to jump on the PSO2 train.  The good thing is that they’re launching something called “Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis” next year, which uses your PSO2 characters in some fashion but that promises a fresh start.  I’m going to put my robot-fetish-fuel character on ice while I wait for that to launch.

 

Posted in MMORPG, Xbox One | 2 Comments

Fire Emblem: Heroes

Posted on September 4, 2020 by baudattitude

OK, so I am somewhat late to the party on Fire Emblem: Heroes, being as it’s a mobile game that launched in February 2017.  At the time, however, I hadn’t played an actual Fire Emblem game (we will set TMS#FE aside) and the initial impressions I got of the title from watching online chatter was that it was pretty harsh to play if you weren’t willing to put some real money down, and fast.

I also saw far too many accounts of people starting and resetting the game over and over again to ensure that they could start with a 5-star hero for a leg up, and that just sounded far too tedious.

I eventually DID play a Fire Emblem title – three of them, actually, because I’d bought the Fire Emblem: Fates collected edition cartridge on a whim.  It was a pretty damned good time, and that led to me playing through Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon.

Apparently I like going backwards, or something?

This still was not enough to make me play FE: Heroes.

This, however, was:

Corrin is the main character in all three of the Fates games, and she is simultaneously both Best Girl AND Best Dragon, since her story begins at about the point where she discovers that (a) she’s adopted, (b) her adoptive family is a bundle of dicks and (c) she tends to grow wings, scales, and a pointy tail when she is under stress.

Plus fire breath.  Really, she’s the whole package.

I’ve since discovered that many of the Fire Emblem games contain cute girls that turn into dragons from time to time, but Corrin is exceptional in that she actually LOOKS like an adult rather than looking like a 12-year-old who claims she’s actually over a thousand and that gives her some serious points on the waifu scale.

At any rate, I obviously had to play this game, and I obviously had to keep resetting the game until I got her as one of my characters.

If you start a game of Fire Emblem: Heroes today, you get handed about 40 of the currency used to summon characters.  Each summon attempt costs 5 of these, and you have about a 5% chance of getting a 5-star character like Corrin.  There are multiple 5-star heroes in this event, however, so the actual odds were pretty bad.

I didn’t actually count the number of times I installed FE: Heroes, went through the tutorial, summoned a bunch of characters and then deleted the game, but I spent about three hours at it before this finally popped up:

I may have punched the air and exclaimed something along the lines of “woo” at this point.

After this, I ran through the rest of my currency and all of the other free summons that Nintendo handed me, and wound up with a lot of characters to choose from.  I had two other 5-star units from Fates (Camilla and Rinkah), and that formed the basis for a pretty strong team.

I was used to typical Fire Emblem maps being huge, sprawling affairs that can take upwards of an hour to clear.  Heroes battles are more tiny skirmishes on an 8×6 map.

This is my second team.  It’s more more focused on characters from Awakening.

The battles are likewise fairly streamlined, but most of the considerations from the full-sized games are in place.  You want to try to bait the enemy AI into coming into range of a unit that will have a tactical advantage, you need to consider the weapon triangle, your flying characters seem to have an amazing affinity for arrows, really it’s the whole Fire Emblem package with the exceptions being that there are no critical hits and there doesn’t seem to be any notion of a hit chance lower than 100%.

The actual battle screens are pretty adorable and full of energetic shouts as you engage in combat.

OH HAI MR. THIEF. DO YOU LIKE DRAGONS?

Thus far, I’ve played for four or five days, done a bunch of story missions and a bunch of side content and am very happy with what the game gives me for – as of this point in time – exactly zero dollars and zero cents.  There are a ton of game modes, maps are gated behind a stamina bar BUT it refills pretty quickly, you collect a bunch of new characters just from completing quests and doing daily maps, and it seems like you get a new summon for free every time a new set of characters comes into the rotation.  The latest one gave me yet ANOTHER 5-star healer.

DEFINITELY not Tom Hiddleston.

Let’s be perfectly clear here.  Nintendo, Intelligent Systems, whoever is responsible for this game, they have decided that the average players are very likely male and easily influenced by the power of 2D hooters.   This is even more apparent when they get wounded in combat and their “battle-damaged” versions look like this:

If I’m honest, I can’t fault their judgement on this issue.  I’m a little unsure on the whole greaves-but-no-boots aesthetic though.  Even girls who are dragons probably wear shoes of some sort.

Also the way Corrin’s waist is twisting here gives me a little pause.  It doesn’t look ENTIRELY comfortable.

If you’d rather avoid the more scantily-clad characters, there ARE plenty with more modest outfits.  Anna, here, was one of my favorite units in Awakening and I have been using her a lot.

Anna does NOT turn into a dragon.  On the other hand, she has a big axe and likes to hit people.  It’s a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

I probably would not have enjoyed this game when it came out.  Reading some impressions from that time, it was super grindy and not very forgiving if your characters died in combat – you didn’t lose them, but they lost any experience they’d gained on that map.  It also didn’t have nearly such a generous approach to handing out high-tier units.  Really, starting this over three years into its lifespan means that I am playing on Super Baby Casual Mode.

I am perfectly OK with that.

 

Posted in Uncategorized, videogames | 2 Comments

Pokémon Café Mix

Posted on September 3, 2020 by baudattitude

Now that I’m out of backlog*, I have been playing around with a few f2p games that had been on my radar but that I hadn’t wanted to delve into while I was trying to play games that I’d actually paid for.  There will be a few posts in the next few days as I give my impressions of each, starting with the Switch version of Pokémon Café Mix.  Apparently it’s also available for iOS and Android devices but there’s no cross-save functionality there.

Side note: I’m not entirely sold on the é in Café but it’s that way on the title screen so what the heck.  Have I been spelling this word wrong all my life?

Anyway.  I’m just going to refer to it as PCM for the remainder of this post because it will be shorter to type and will help relieve the anxiety I am feeling about the accent mark.

I’ve played a couple of the portable Pokémon games, and will probably eventually pick up the latest Switch game, but I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to the mythos as it presents itself through the Epic Journey Of A Young Boy (or Girl) As They Subjugate Many Small Creatures And Battle To Become The Best.  I’ve also been actively turned off every time I’ve dared browse forum threads about the games, because they tend to devolve into a morass of impenetrable acronyms and jargon.

However, the actual critters are cute.  There’s no getting around this.  And I am weak to cute, and so I have a modest amount of Pokémerch in my house.

PCM, as far as I can tell, does not lend itself to complex theorycrafting about Pokémon and training and matchups and all that nonsense.  It’s a simple puzzle game that puts the player in the role of running a restaurant that caters to Pokémon and that employs Pokémon as chefs and servers and it lets you dress Pokémon up in hats, and frankly that’s enough for me.

Heck with it.  Prepare for MORE POKÉMON IN HATS.

According to Bulbapedia, which I am given to understand is something of an Authority-With-A-Capital-A on All Things Pokémon, Celebi is “a Mythical Pokémon, known in legend as the “Voice of the Forest.” It is able to travel through time and exist simultaneously throughout time, and plant life flourishes wherever it has been.”

In PCM, Celebi just wants to make pancakes and Celebi is DAMN GOOD at making pancakes.  Honestly, the food in this game looks delicious.

…OK, some of it looks suspiciously like Pokémon butt.  MOST of it looks delicious.

The gameplay loop is pretty simple.  Pokémon walks into a restaurant, Pokémon orders some food…

Snubbull would like a Rowlet-shaped pizza.

Also, she would like you to KILL ALL THE JEDI.

…you have to play a little game where you match up strings of icons so they explode with all kinds of happy little pops, eventually food comes out of this somehow.

A typical goal screen looks something like this:

And matching up icons looks like this.  They aren’t your typical match-3 icons that stay put while you make your selection, these bounce around and move other icons around and can be a little annoying at times actually.  Sometimes you need to use this to move icons around the screen to complete goals.

Side note: PCM is a touch-only, handheld-only game, so you won’t be playing it on your TV.  I think this is the first Switch game I’ve run across where that’s a THING but I can’t see how they could have done the controls any other way.

For a F2P game, it’s pretty generous with what it gives out.  There’s no real “stamina” bar unless you fail puzzles, so you can easily sit down and knock out 15 or 20 of these in a row for a happy little dopamine hit without spending a dime.  There’s a in-game currency (“golden acorns”) that you can use to get a few extra moves if you need them, and I’ve done this on occasion, but you get a decent amount of acorns from just playing the game.

You can pay four bucks for some acorns AND a Pikachu-in-a-DIFFERENT-hat, and I can totally see people dropping four bucks on that, I guess.

Note: Not my picture, I stole it off twitter.  I did not spend four bucks on “Sweets Pikachu”, but I am not going to judge anyone who does.

To condense all of that into a shorter version: It’s a cute little time killer that will probably make you smile.  If that sounds good, I recommend it.

Also apparently there is an actual Pokémon Cafe in Tokyo.  Going to have to check that out the next time I’m there.

* When I say “out of backlog”, I am ignoring the fact that I was weak and bought Luigi’s Mansion 3 during the most recent eShop sale.

 

Posted in Switch, videogames | 1 Comment

Apple Content Caching, Secret Wallpapers, and Desk Porn

Posted on August 17, 2020 by baudattitude

I have been doing a lot of tweaking my home tech setup recently, and I wanted to share a few random Apple / iOS tricks today.

I recently discovered a YouTube channel named マメ (“mame”) that is full of short and very well-produced videos, and the first two tricks come from this channel.

The first is this short review and how-to on an application that is just so VERY Japanese, because it allows you to replace your existing nerdy wallpaper with a boring, work-and-society-approved wallpaper that you can then press to show your REAL wallpaper whenever you need a personal pick-me-up.

I found myself empathizing with this a lot, since I have a Very Serious Face that I wear at work and being the boring guy has been a big help to my career.  On the other hand, I love my Uzaki-chan wallpaper and it never fails to make me smile.

Anyway, I watched this video and decided that I needed the app, but the application name was obviously in Japanese and I didn’t know if it was available in the US App Store or how to find it.

It turned out that searching on やは嫁 brought up the English version, which was completely unexpected.

Another of マメ’s videos was this roughly nine minute long bit of minimalistic desk porn, which I mostly watched because I am a huge fan of minimalistic desk porn and that turned out to have a really clever idea in the middle of all of the product shilling.

The iPhone has a feature called AirPlay that you can use to stream your screen to an Apple TV or other device that supports the AirPlay protocol, and he set up an iOS shortcut to turn on AirPlay and point it at his TV, which isn’t the brilliant part but which I didn’t know was possible.  Here’s the video and you can skip past it if you just want to know the brilliant part without watching the whole thing.

The brilliant part is that he then set this shortcut to activate by touching his phone to an NFC tag, so he can just tap his phone against the edge of his desk and suddenly his display is being mirrored to the TV.  Moreover, if you have an Apple TV and have enabled HDMI-CEC, this will turn on your television and receiver etc.

I’m not huge on home automation, but this is bloody magic.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is something that I would like to take credit for,  but that I have trouble feeling too proud of since it has probably been staring me in the face for years.

Basically, I noticed that there is a checkbox in the macOS Sharing Properties called Content Caching that I had somehow never seen, and that it had a very interesting description.

What this does is simple: it turns one Mac on your network into a caching proxy for OS and application updates.  We have a lot of Macs, and a lot of iOS devices around, so now whenever one device downloads an update it is stored on the Mac with Content Caching turned on.  If any other devices want the same update, they get it from the content cache and NOT from the internet.

Over a month, it’s a pretty good bandwidth savings.  Our assorted iDevices requested a little over 54GB of data during the last 30 days, and about 40% of this came off the server and didn’t chip away at our bandwidth cap.  Granted, the bandwidth cap is a solid 1 TB and we’ve never exceeded it, but I just FEEL good about this.

You can apparently set this to cache all iCloud content as well.  I’m not sure if that applies to streaming movies off iTunes or not.  If it does, then this could be a huge savings if you like to rewatch the same thing.

I’m not planning to turn this into a weird tech productivity blog – there are enough of those already – but sometimes I find things I just want to share with other people, and hopefully this wasn’t too weird of a topic.

Posted in iOS, mac | Leave a comment

Girls’ Last Tour

Posted on August 15, 2020 by baudattitude

I’ve been turning off subscriptions to streaming services lately, with the idea being that I probably have too many going at any one time and that when I actually DO feel like binging some series or another I can always turn them back on.

Amazon Prime was the most recent to get turned off, but before I pulled the plug on it I spent some time going through their catalog of subtitled anime.

That’s how I stumbled across Girls’ Last Tour, which sure looked like yet another show about cute girls doing cute things.  This time, the hook seemed to be that it was two girls driving around in a kettenkrad, a sort of weird German motorcycle/tank hybrid thing from the 1940s.

I’m always up for some CGDGT, so I settled in to watch an episode or two… and wound up watching the entire twelve episode series without a break.

Soooooooo.  If you have ever opened your pantry or refrigerator, surveyed a dozen or more food options, and said something along the lines of “oh, man, there’s nothing to eat” and closed the door… you might want to be careful about watching Girls’ Last Tour, because you are going to feel miserably guilty before the show hits the halfway point.

Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, it’s set about 1200 years in the future, at a point where we have finally managed to kill off every living thing on the planet, and the two girls in their kettenkrad are constantly moving forward looking for anything they can eat and any source of gas to keep their wheels and treads turning.

Most of what they find to eat is non-perishable military rations in various flavors, and there’s a recurring gag about “this one is xxx flavored.  I wonder what xxx was?” where xxx might, for example, be chocolate or cheese.

And yes, it eventually makes sense why they are driving a vehicle from before the semiconductor age.  One of the not-terribly-subtle themes of the show is that weapons can long outlive their makers.

This is not normally my type of show.  Normally, I want crazy upbeat shows about cute girls becoming idol singers or painfully nice guys getting saddled with a harem consisting entirely of mythological creatures with improbably-oversized knockers, and the only upbeat things about Girls’ Last Tour are the opening and ending songs.

Which are just impossibly catchy, to be fair.

 

There, I feel much happier now.

One thing that IS positive about the show is that, while the girls do occasionally run into other people, they’re generally pleasant people.  It’s super common for post-apocalyptic media to fall into the trap of Every Other Human Is Out To Kill You, Don’t Trust Them, but this particular apocalypse seems to have been so thoroughly apocalyptic that the few remaining people are just trying to get through their days.

It also ends very well, with an episode that gives a lot of hints about just how the world got into its current godawful state and gives you just a little hope for the future of the main characters.

Basically, this isn’t my sort of show in general and yet I really enjoyed it.  There are enough moments of tiny happiness that you can almost forget the oppressive setting, and it definitely gives you a certain sort of perspective on life.

Like, I dare you to watch this show, open the aforementioned pantry or fridge, and NOT be  overwhelmed by and thankful for the sheer variety of food staring you in the face.

Posted in anime | Leave a comment