A very simple guide to playing Mahjong video games.

Posted on October 5, 2018 by baudattitude

I will be the first to acknowledge that my fondness for Japanese arcade mahjong games is one of my more… rarefied quirks, and that any time I post about them I am basically screaming into the void in the vain hopes of finding other fans so we can be mahjong buddies and go on adventures together.

With that in mind, I thought maybe I should put together a short article on how to play them, in hopes of infecting others with this particular affliction.

So, here we go.

Let’s start with defining what I mean by arcade-style mahjong.

Proper mahjong – not mahjong solitaire, which is the tile matching game most people think of when they hear the word – is a game sort of like gin rummy, normally played with four people and at least 16 hands per game. Each player starts with a fixed number of points, usually 25000, and wins and losses result in the points getting passed around the table. At the end of the game, the person with the highest number of points wins.

Arcade mahjong games are much simpler and are usually just you vs. the CPU. Generally your goal isn’t to run the CPU out of points so much as it is to get a certain number of wins before they can run YOU out of points, though taking all of the CPU’s points is usually a quick path to victory. (And certainly satisfying.)

This guide is designed to teach you a very abbreviated subset of the rules – basically, all you need to know in order to play mahjong at an entry level and win.  If you’re reading this as someone who is already familiar with the game, please don’t point out all of the stuff I’m leaving out.

But, before getting into how to play mahjong, you need to know the game pieces, so let’s start with  a quick overview of the tiles.

Japanese mahjong has three numbered suits, one set of four “winds” tiles, and one set of three “dragon” tiles. (Chinese versions of the game add some more tiles, so you’ll see season and flower tiles in a Chinese mahjong set or game.)

The three suits are:

“Sou”, which is represented by pieces of bamboo.

Note that the one of this suit is normally shown as a bird rather than a single piece of bamboo.

“Wan”, which is… well, it’s a counter for tens of thousands.  There’s no good mnemonic here.  Just think of them as “number” tiles, I guess.

These may have Arabic numerals or just kanji. A side effect of playing mahjong is that you will probably learn the kanji for 1-9 very quickly.

And, finally, “Pin” which you will probably just think of as “balls”

The four winds are:

From left to right: East, South, West, North.  You don’t need to know anything more right now.

The three dragons are:

White, Green, and Red dragons.  In a lot of games, the white dragon is a completely blank tile.  I’m just using pictures of the tiles from my own set here, and my set happens to have a decorative border on the white dragons.

Finally, three terms that you should know. A sequence of three numbered tiles in order is a “chi“, a three of a kind is a “pon“, and four of a kind is a “kan“. You may also see these as “chow, pung, and kong” which are the Chinese terms for the same things.

There are four of each tile in a mahjong set, by the way.

Some chi. Wan 1-2-3, Sou 7-8-9 and Pin 3-4-5.

Some pon and a kan.  Sou 5-5-5, Wan 7-7-7, 3 x Red and 4 x West

A four of a kind isn’t automatically a kan, by the way. If you had 4 5 6 6 6 6, you could see it as a 4-5-6 chi and a 6-6-6 pon. If you draw a four of a kind, you will usually be prompted for whether you want to convert it into a kan or keep it as-is.

Pin 4-5-6-6-6-6

Play flow

Arcade mahjong is 2-player, which makes things much simpler than four-player versions of the game. Each player starts out with 13 tiles. The first player draws a tile.  If it makes a winning hand, they declare their win.  Otherwise, they decide whether to keep it or discard it. If they keep it, they must discard another tile from their hand to stay at 13 tiles.

The next player can either draw a tile or react to the most recently discarded tile by melding it into their own hand to complete a chi, pon, or kan. If they meld a discard into their own hand, they must put the resultant chi, pon, or kan down, face up, so the other players can see what they used the tile for.  They then discard a tile, and this repeats until either someone reaches a win state or all of the tiles are used up.

Many games will prompt you whenever you can take your opponent’s tiles for your own hand.  It’s not always the best thing to do, and I recommend against it in most cases.  More on that later.

(Technically, completing a kan means that you now have a 14-tile hand. You can have 15, 16, or even 17-tile hands if you keep making kan.  Having kans instead of pons can improve your final score but is not needed for most win conditions.)

How to Win

The default winning hand is one consisting of four chi, pon, or kan, and a “pillow” made up of a pair of tiles.

Sou 1-2-3, Wan 4-5-6, West x 3, Pin 6-6-6 and Sou 6-6

Another easy one to keep track of is a hand made of seven pairs.  You can’t use any of your opponent’s discards for this, unless you are taking their tile to complete your seventh pair to win.

Pin 1-1, 6-6, and 8-8, Sou 6-6, Wan 2-2, West x 2, Green x 2

Your goal is to collect tiles to make up one of these two winning hands, but there is a catch. A winning hand must also include at least one “yaku”, which is sort of like a score multiplier. A seven-pairs hand always has one yaku, so I will ignore that and cover three of the simplest yaku that you can aim for when building up a standard hand of chi, pon, and a pillow.

1) The closed-hand yaku. (menzen) If you build your hand using only your own draws, this is called a closed hand and gives you one yaku. This is easy to build, because you simply ignore every time the game gives you the option to pon or chi off a discard – unless you are taking your opponent’s piece to complete a winning hand.

Conversely, a hand built using any of your opponent’s discards is called an open hand.

2) Pon-of-Dragons Yaku. (yakuhai) Simply having three of any dragon tile means that you have one yaku and therefore a viable hand.  This can be closed or open – if you have two white dragons and your opponent drops a white dragon, feel free to pon off it.

3) All-Pon Yaku.  (toitoi) Make a hand of four pons and a pillow, either closed or open.  If you start your hand with a few pairs, this can be a good hand to aim for, especially if the CPU discards some of the final tiles you need early on.  If you are lucky enough to build a closed hand of all pons, it’s suu ankou which is worth a ridiculous number of points.

There are two kinds of wins in mahjong, and most games will pop up a message to let you know that you can “Ron” or “Tsumo”.  A Ron is when you complete a winning hand using your opponent’s discard.  If you complete a winning hand using only your own draws, this is called a “Tsumo”.  There’s no difference between these two kinds of wins in 2-player mahjong, though they are important for scoring in 4-player mahjong.

So, to sum all of this up, the easiest strategy to follow is to simply ignore your opponent’s discards and try to build a winning hand using only your own draws. If you happen to luck into a three-of-a-kind of dragon tiles, feel free to go crazy taking their tiles to build up your chis and pons. Finally, if you are waiting on a single tile to make a winning hand and your opponent discards that tile, grab it for a victory.

Watch what the CPU does, and what tiles have already been discarded! If you have two of a tile and there are two of the same tile in the discards, you’re not going to be getting a third of that same tile to make a pon.  Likewise, you will probably see that the CPU discards all of its wind and dragon tiles very early in the match, and this is a very good thing to do as well unless you start with at least a pair.

One final thing – if you have a closed hand and draw a tile that puts you one tile away from winning, you can declare “riichi”.  You then select a tile from your hand to discard, and from that point on you are locked into waiting for the tile that will give you a win state.  This gives you one more yaku, so it will boost your final hand. “Riichi” sounds a lot like “Reach” so you will often see Japanese mahjong called “Reach” mahjong. Likewise, if your opponent calls “Riichi”, you know they are on the verge of winning.

Hopefully this is useful.  I had fun writing it, even with the constant sound of the voices in my head screaming about all the stuff I was leaving out.  It’s intended to demystify mahjong and let you get some basic wins – if you wind up enjoying the game and want to know more, there are lots of resources you can use to dig in deep.

Posted in mahjong | 2 Comments

Hot Gimmick Cosplay-Jong for Nintendo Switch

Posted on October 4, 2018 by baudattitude

Sometimes, I put a great deal of effort into finding a pun or a bit of wordplay to use as a post title, and sometimes it seems superfluous.  With a game like this, I saved myself the time.

So.  To avoid typing out the entire name every time, Hot Gimmick Cosplay-Jong for Nintendo Switch will henceforth be referred to as HGCJ4NS.  Rolls right off the tongue, right?

I am not very well-versed in the Hot Gimmick series of mahjong games, since they didn’t get Saturn releases back in the day.  From looking at Wikipedia, they were mostly arcade and PC releases, with a couple of Dreamcast and PS2 games, and HGCJ4NS appears to be a port of the 2005 PS2 game… even though it has a copyright date of 1997 on the main screen.

To the best of my knowledge, HGCJ4NS is the first Japanese arcade-style mahjong game to get an official English-language localization for any console ever.  There were a couple released on Steam, under the “Pretty Girls Mahjong Battle” series, but Steam is… well, it’s Steam.  There’s no major manufacturer looking at every game submitted to the Steam store and making sure it’s up to their standards, which is more apparent every day if you are brave enough to delve too deeply into the New Releases section, so there’s no hurdle to trip over, Omega Labyrinth-style, before winding up in the land of the red, white and blue.

Being on a console – much less a Nintendo console – this game making it to our shores is something of a feat.  Mind you, ever since I got about two hours into Breath of the Wild and met Purah, the “She’s really over a hundred years old! Honest!” lolicon-bait  researcher, I’ve realized that Nintendo is not quite as strict with their family-friendly localization policies this generation, but STILL.

Making it even less likely that HGCJ4NS would ever get localized, the plot is… oh, hell, let’s bust out the P word.  It’s PROBLEMATIC, and if you need me I shall be over on my fainting couch with a sudden attack of the vapors.

Most mahjong games fall into the category of wanting to beat up other mahjong players so you can be the best mahjong player that ever was, though some get a little wacky.  Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai IV, for example, has you in the role of managing a failing maid cafe and trying to poach employees from other maid cafes around Akihabara by mahjonging them into submission.

HGCJ4NS has you, well, disciplining your opponents into being better people by a) beating them at mahjong and b) making them wear embarrassing outfits until they confess their sins and promise to be a better person.

For example, one of your opponents is disrespectful to her betters, and another is an American woman who looks down on Japan.  A third won’t eat carrots.

Won’t. Eat. Carrots.

Obviously these are sins that require a good scourging of the flesh, or at least humiliation-by-mahjong.

Meting out justice is somewhat hindered, mind you, by the fact that the deck is stacked against you.  Which is a poker metaphor and thus inappropriate.  Hmm.  Tiles are stacked against you? That doesn’t quite scan.  YOU WILL GET YOUR BUTT WHUPPED, SON.  There we go.

Yeah, I believe that this sanbaiman was completely legitimate.

HGCJ4NS is a mahjong game that expects you to actually know how to play, to an unusual extent.  Normally, arcade mahjong will prompt you when you can meld off your opponent’s discard, or when you can declare riichi, or AT LEAST when you are holding a winning hand.  HGCJ4NS does none of this, and will cheerfully let you discard winning tiles without a moment’s hesitation.

In addition, you start off hands with a tiny number of points – only 2000 – and it takes very little effort on the CPU’s part to burn through your 2000 points and send you back to the Continue? screen.

You get two continues by default, by the way.

Furthermore, you need to win three hands – or starve the CPU of its points – in order to actually beat them, and the hand count gets reset if you continue.  It’s pretty savage, though that does make any victories all that much more satisfying.

I did say “by default”, mind you.  HGCJ4NS allows for a lot of customization.  You can set the game to unlimited continues, or bump up your starting points, or change the difficulty higher or lower, and once you’ve tweaked some of that it becomes much easier to teach those rebellious girls a lesson about being, uh, less rebellious?  Did I mention that this plot makes me twitch a little bit thinking about it?

Also buried in the options menu are settings to run the game in its original low-resolution graphics, to stretch the 4:3 image to fill the entire Switch screen, to add scanlines if you feel like it, that sort of thing.  I’m partial to high-resolution graphics and a non-stretched image but with scanlines, myself.

There are three opponents on the starting screen, and once you beat them you are given another three to challenge.  It looks like there are 12 girls to play mahjong against.  I haven’t gotten there yet.  You can’t challenge the later opponents directly, mind you, so you will probably be facing off against the initial three quite a few times.

Oh, and the localization is terrible.  We’re talking someone just fed the text through a machine translator and called it a day levels of localization, here.  It’s passable, though, and… well, it’s not like Zerodiv has a lot of competition in the English-localized arcade mahjong genre or anything.  If you’re into it, just be into it.

Posted in mahjong, Switch, videogames | 2 Comments

Is this cultural appropriation?

Posted on September 22, 2018 by baudattitude

When I was younger, I spent a few years living in a small town in the heart of Corn Country, which you can imagine was a bad place to be the “weird kid”.

To this day, I joke that the first Google suggestion when you type in the name of the town is “how do I escape from…”, and this isn’t ENTIRELY true.  The first google suggestion, in reality, is “directions from xxx to mt rushmore” and I will point out that this is almost the same thing inasmuch as it is a request for a route to get out of town and to somewhere interesting.

In all fairness, now that I live in a coastal state, I kind of enjoy meeting other people who managed to get out of similarly…rural…areas, because we often find a sort of camaraderie in having, for lack of a better term, “hick-offs”, wherein we share anecdotes and try to one-up each other with how awful the places we came from were.

That said, there’s not much that raises my hackles more than being around someone who has never lived in the mid-west but still wants to make fun of the area or its residents.  It’s something you can only get away with if you’ve actually been a part of the culture.

With that in mind, I was a little hesitant to try Far Cry 5, because the first impression I had of it was that it was, in short, “let’s shoot some crazy hicks: the video game”.  I probably wouldn’t have tried it at all if it hadn’t been recommended to me by a friend who has a nearly 100% track record in turning me on to games, but he DID recommend it to me and it DID happen to go on sale on Xbox Marketplace shortly after he recommended it and the rest is something you can probably reconstruct.

I’ve put about three hours in, and I am pleased to report that its depiction of the residents of Montana is nowhere near as stereotypical as I’d expected.  There is, obviously, a cult, but most of the locals are just as unhappy to have an apocalyptic death cult in their midst as the player is, and they happily supply you with supplies and firepower when you show up and start knocking cultist heads about.

I will, however, feign offense at just how well a pair of Canadian studios have captured the essence of small-town America, and I don’t think any example shows this quite as well as the bar in one of the first towns you liberate:

There are also signs for a “Testicle Festival” along the roads, featuring a very shocked-looking bull… and, yeah, OK, you Canadians have us there.  I’m still reserving judgement on whether you have the right to poke fun at us, but I’ll at least admit that you’re doing a good job of it.

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox One | Leave a comment

Anakin Did Nothing Wrong

Posted on September 20, 2018 by baudattitude

I’ve been trying to hold fast to my no-MMOs policy this year, and in general I’ve been doing well with that.  The sole exception has been a bit of a dalliance with Star Wars: The Old Republic, though in my defense I will say that this is something I’m doing at my wife’s bidding since she is a huge fan.  If I wind up falling back into the sort of persistent MMO trance I used to sink into back in my EQ days, she has only herself to blame.

It’s not a typical MMO, though, so it at least has that going for it.  It really feels like eight separate single-player games, one for each PC class, where you just happen to see other people running around occasionally, with no need to interact with any of them if you just want to play through your class story.  There are, I understand, dungeons and raids to be tackled if you want bigger numbers on your gear… but apart from that, the “MM” part of “MMO” seems to be heavily downplayed.

I’m treating this as a bit of an experiment.  The game originally launched as a sixty dollar box with a monthly fee and has since become a free-to-play game, albeit one with some hefty restrictions on free players.  For example, a completely free player can’t store their items in the regular bank but needs to wait until they are high enough level to afford a dwelling to stick things in, a free player is limited to two hotbars of skills, and a free player can’t toggle their helmet graphics off.  They’re also limited to specific, more boring, races and receive 20% less experience than a subscriber.

Anyway.  My experiment revolves around playing the game as a complete freeloader and seeing how far I can get in the single-player stories without giving EA a dime.  To that end, I created a human bounty hunter who I refer to as “Biff Punchnuts” though he of course has a proper and far less offensive name.

So far, it’s looking very promising, and I haven’t hit any roadblocks or needed to do any extra grinding.  Rather, I’m finding that I tend to be slightly over level for all of the mandatory quests, even though I’m completely ignoring optional ones.

But, I want to set any discussion of how the game is as a game aside and talk about the setting, because it’s a setting that has always sort of bugged me.

The Old Republic setting started out with a series of comic books, I think, before being turned in to a pair of well-regarded Xbox RPGs and then into this MMO.   It’s set over three thousand years before the events of Star Wars: Episode I, so the fact that the technology used in the Old Republic hasn’t really changed that much in those three thousand years doesn’t make a lick of sense.  The Old Republic has lightsabers, and blasters that look and sound rather like the ones from the movies, and hyperspace travel is a part of normal life, and the landspeeders on Tatooine 3 millennium ago look awfully similar to one that we see rolling down the Mos Eisley streets as Ben and Luke are looking for a pilot to get them to Alderaan.

This makes even less sense when Luke complains that he can’t get much money for his speeder because there are newer models, or when we hear a couple of stormtroopers talking about some new piece of tech.  It’s almost as if technology was completely stagnant for centuries, and then some event started the cycle of innovation up after this long period of stagnation.

For another example – Y-Wing bombers (the greatest starfighter ever put to film) are considered first-rate ships in the Clone Wars and used to great effect in Rogue One, but barely seen on screen after that and completely phased out by the time of Return of the Jedi.  That’s, what, two or three decades before winding up on the scrap heap?  We’ve been flying F-15s for nearly 50 years and are just looking to phase them out in 2022.

So, what if we assume the event that got technology actually started MOVING again was the fall of the Jedi Order… as if the “thousand generations of peace and justice” Kenobi whines about in his little hut were made possible through the Jedi ruthlessly suppressing any technological advancement that might challenge their position as, well, basically a bunch of extremely self-righteous space wizards manipulating the democratically-elected Galactic Senate from behind the scenes.

The parallels to the role of the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages are obvious, and left as an intellectual exercise for the reader.  I’m not sure who Anakin is in this analogy.  Charlemagne, maybe? Look, my sum total of research on the topic is roughly five minutes on Wikipedia.

It is possible, of course, that I am overthinking this.  This has been known to happen.

Still, I really think they should have set the “Old Republic” stuff a couple hundred years – TOPS – before the events of Episode I.

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming, videogames | 2 Comments

14:55:36

Posted on September 16, 2018 by baudattitude

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had a habit of starting new Dark Souls playthroughs, ringing the first Bell of Awakening, and stopping there, and that this takes me about an hour each time.

Well, this last time I started wondering just how long it would take to play through the game if I never stopped to grind and just kept steadily moving forward.  It turns out that it’s just shy of 15 hours, though nearly 2 of that was spent just farming humanity so I could save Solaire before he went insane.  I like Solaire, and though I have killed Gwyn without his help in the past… it’s a lot easy with everyone’s favorite sunbro around to take aggro.

Now, let’s be clear.  The current world record no-glitches Dark Souls speedrun is under an hour.  That guy has nothing to fear from me.  On the other hand, it took me SIXTY HOURS to beat the game the first time I played it, so being able to go back and whip it in a quarter of the time feels awfully good.

For a little extra masochism, I played the PS3 version, arguably the worst experience possible.  I’d only played the dsfixed Prepare to Die edition and the PS4 Remastered edition before, so I’d never experienced Blighttown in its original 15-frames-per-second glory.  It was… something.

I also wound up needing to eat some crow, because I’d seen a lot of people griping about the new lighting in the Remastered edition and to be perfectly honest I figured it was just a bunch of whining.  Playing the PS3 version after the remaster… no, they really do have a point.  I think the newer version is still better overall, but it stings a little to see the obvious room for improvement that could have made it the truly definitive version.

Counterpoint: oh my god the lava.  I don’t know what they were thinking with the lava.  It was blindingly bright, and it made the half-dozen attempts at Bed of Chaos just that extra bit of awful.

The bigger shock, however, was just how active the seven-year-old PS3 version is.  Nearly every boss room had at least one summon sign sitting in front of it, even the Kiln of the First Flame.  Early bosses, like the Gargoyles and Quelaag, had several signs, and  I even got invaded twice!

…mind you, I died both times.  But at least they were fair fights, not the “and now I will teleport behind you and backstab you” fights that had me turning off the online on the PS4 game.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of old favorites this year, and I should probably do less of that.  At least I haven’t been BUYING a ton of brand-new AAA games to feel guilty about.

 

Posted in ps3, Souls, videogames | Leave a comment

On Cultural Exchange

Posted on September 15, 2018 by baudattitude

A few days ago, I mentioned that I’d thrown in my Japanese copy of Dark Souls to unwind after a little bit of a vexing day.  It wasn’t one of my more accessible posts, since I was talking about trophies not popping and giving no explanations for why I found that so weird, and I should probably avoid posts full of in-jokes in future.

…in future.

It’s not the future yet, so I’m going to point out one more thing I got a laugh out of from playing the Japanese version of the game.

One of the more…endearing? Sure, that’s a word. Let’s run with it.

One of the more endearing things about the Souls games is the way that the player base uses the in-game messaging system for two purposes:

  1. In an attempt to get other players to jump off of high places and die.
  2. To make off-color jokes that would be the envy of any 7th-grade cafeteria.

The most prominent example of #2, of course, is the floor in front of Gwynevere, the improbably-endowed self-proclaimed Queen of Sunlight.  Anyone who has struggled through Anor Londo to enter her chamber will be met with a sea of messages along the lines of “Amazing Chest Ahead” or “Try Holding With Both Hands”, and one of the things I have been a little curious about is whether the same sort of sophomoric humor would show up in the Japanese version.

Sadly, I must report that “Amazing Chest Ahead” does not appear to be a joke that works in both languages.

On the other, er, hand,

…I am happy to report that “Try Holding With Both Hands” seems to be universal.

This has been your Cultural Exchange Moment of the day.

 

Posted in ps3, Souls | Leave a comment

An entirely heretical opinion about Mass Effect 3.

Posted on September 14, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I finished my full Mass Effect series play-through several days ago, but I wanted to sit on this and think about it.

I first played the trilogy in 2014, and the second game was easily my favorite.  It had a huge cast of characters and I loved how everyone got a spotlight mission to dig into their past and their motivations.  I thought the ending was a little… silly, if I’m honest, but that was my only quibble.

Anyway, a big part of my reason for playing through all three games again was because I wanted to play Mass Effect 2 with all of the DLC expansions.  And they were… OK?  They were pretty OK.  I liked the Kasumi character mission, and Lair of the Shadow Broker, but the other two expansions didn’t really grab me, and adding two more crewmembers to the Normandy felt a little unnecessary considering the size of the cast.

I also wound up feeling frustrated by the simplified character customization options – both the skill trees and the gear you acquired felt like huge steps backwards from the first game.

So, it was still great… but I realized that I much preferred the first game, for all of its janky animations and spotty performance, just because it felt more like an RPG and less like a combination of a mediocre cover shooter and an RPG.

After that, I started Mass Effect 3 with some trepidation.

Mass Effect 3, it turns out, is a bit like a milkshake.  A proper diner milkshake, that is, one of the ones where they bring you out a glass of milkshake and then a tumbler full of more milkshake to pour into your glass when you’re finished with the first serving.  At the bottom of the glass, there is a mess of chocolate sludge that you regret drinking almost as soon as you’ve drunken it.

In this analogy, the tumbler of more milkshake is the DLC and the chocolate sludge is the ending.  Endings.  Look, I’m not particularly good at descriptive writing.

Leaving my literary failings aside, it turns out that it’s a pretty good milkshake.  In fact, I wound up liking it more than the middle entry in the trilogy, which shocked the heck out of me.  It’s still half cover shooter and half RPG, but the shooter part of it feels MUCH better than it did in both previous games, and it’s a lot more challenging on the “Normal” difficulty level than I expected.

Part of that is because your squadmates are as dumb as bricks at times, which I will acknowledge as a very valid critique of the game.  But only part.

ME3 also brings back interesting skill trees and an overflowing arsenal of loot and upgrading weapons and installing mods and choosing between your favorite mods and your favorite ammo types and… look, if enjoying choosing which of a dozen subtly-different shotguns I want Tali to be packing is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Also, while the side stories in ME2 were great, ME3 is where you finally see stuff pay off.  You get to see the end of the Krogan genophage storyline, you find out where the Geth came from and maybe even get to negotiate a truce with them, you catch up with the Rachni queen and even find that Conrad Verner has been hiding a brain under that knockoff N7 helmet.

You notice I am not talking about the END end, just the satisfaction of seeing the plot threads from ME1 and ME2 finally tied off.

Then you dig into that second tumbler of milkshake and it turns out that the expansions are pretty fantastic as well.  It’s a shame that they originally cost as much or more than the game proper, of course.  I’m looking at them from the perspective of someone who got them for 1/3rd of their original prices.  “Omega” is a little bit of a shooting gallery, but “Leviathan” and “Citadel” were so good that it’s nearly criminal that they aren’t bundled with the main game.

It’s one really good milkshake…

…

…and then you hit the chocolate sludge.  And, yeah, it’s the last thing you’re going to remember about the milkshake, and none of the endings are particularly SATISFYING (Though I did wind up enjoying the Deus Ex-esque “Control” ending), but it’s still a 40 hour game that nails the first 39 hours before hitting a banana peel while trying to stick the landing.

So here I am, completely rethinking how I felt about these games.  I’m not absolutely certain whether I prefer the first or the third, but suddenly the one I would have raved about (to anyone patient enough to listen) is sitting on the third place pedestal and wondering what happened.

Crazy times.

Posted in Xbox 360 | 3 Comments

The Dark Souls of Trophy Glitches

Posted on September 10, 2018 by baudattitude

After finishing my Mass Effect trilogy replay – I’ll have a post about that in a few days – I was looking through my backlog for inspiration and realized that I had a bunch of games on the PS3 that had been picked up in one PSN sale or another and never played.  I figured I’d dig the system out, hook it up, and see whether or not I actually wanted to give any of them any serious time.

The answer was no, by the way, which was kind of a depressing realization.  I doubt I spent more than five dollars on any of the games I wound up consigning to the digital trash heap, but it was still a reminder that I used to be pretty indiscriminate in what I bought, so long as it was a bargain.

Anyway, after feeling a bit silly about the money I’d wasted, I decided to work off some of the frustration with a quick Dark Souls session.  I’d never actually played the PS3 version of DS1, but I picked up a disc of it in Japan last year because I liked the cover art and I thought it might be interesting to see what the game was like under the limitations of its original hardware.

(Unsurprisingly, it’s the same game, just a little less pretty and a little more clunky.)

I have a habit of starting up Dark Souls, creating a new character, making a mad dash through the graveyard to grab the Zweihander, grinding up enough levels so I can two-hand it, and then going and killing the Taurus Demon and the Gargoyles so I can ring the first bell of awakening.  It takes me a bit over an hour to do this.  I’m not exactly a speedrunner.

The strangest thing happened when I got to the bonfire above Andre, however – I had the “Estus Flask” trophy pop.  This is normally a trophy you get about five minutes into the tutorial.  On the other hand, I was playing a Japanese version of the game.  Maybe the trophies were laid out differently?

I kept going, whacked the Gargoyles, got the general feeling of self-satisfaction that always comes after killing a Souls boss even if you’ve killed it a dozen times before, rode the elevator back to Firelink and shut the game down.

Then I took another look at my trophies…

…I’m not really sure how that happened, but I’m kind of tickled to see it.

Side note, when it comes to games you wouldn’t expect to still have any multiplayer action happening, the original Dark Souls ought to be right at the top of the list.  It’s seven years old at this point, and there are superior versions on every modern console and PC.  I did NOT expect to get to Solaire’s ledge before the gargoyles and see FOUR white soapstone signs next to his bright yellow summon sign.

 

 

Posted in ps3, Souls | Leave a comment

Being a basically immature individual.

Posted on September 9, 2018 by baudattitude

Discovering Evan Dorkin in my late teens may not have been the best thing for me.  That point in your life is when you’re supposed to start Growing Up, and I was doing an OK job of it… and then I found Hectic Planet.  I’m not going to say it’s completely responsible for my spending the last few decades with a maturity level stuck at roughly twelve years old, but it was certainly a contributing factor.

It’s in this general spirit that I regularly seek out and eat novelty “food” items, most of which are Very Bad For Me.  That’s your rainbow frappucinos, your grossly-oversized burgers, your deep-fried-anything.  Fair food.

Frankly, it’s a wonder I’ve lived this long.

Anyway, Carl’s Jr is currently selling a limited edition dessert item consisting of a box of Froot Loops-themed mini donuts, and I would like to be very clear that I was actually sort of being an adult here.  I did NOT go to Carl’s Jr to buy a box as soon as I found out about them.

On the other hand, when my wife asked me if I wouldn’t mind stopping at their drive-thru window so I could bring home burgers, well… obviously it was a sign.

Froot Loops were always a favorite cereal of mine when I was a small lad, and I have fond memories of getting up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons and pound down bowl after bowl of, basically, a shaped and brightly-colored sugar substrate.

I have less fond memories of the first time I actually made myself sick in the process.  But let us continue.

What you get for your money is five tiny donuts in gloriously brilliant shades of neon.

Hilariously, when I went to find the nutritional information for these things on the Carls Jr web site, I found them filed under “breakfast sides” and not “desserts”, which is, um, creative if nothing else.  I guess it’s because they’re cereal themed, but the Dave Berry gag about “part of a balanced breakfast” has never seemed more appropriate.

For the record, the box of donuts is 320 calories – less than a package of Pop Tarts –  so it’s not the absolute worst thing you could be eating.  Take that to heart as you order your own box.

I expected… well, I expected the worst, to be honest.  I have never been a fan of Hostess Donettes, and that’s what these kind of look like.  I also haven’t eaten the cereal these are based on since those days of Saturday morning cartoons, so I was expecting to have some last bits of my childhood ruined.

With that last bit in mind, I cannot say for certain whether these actually taste like Froot Loops cereal.  I CAN say that they have a taste and smell that is 100% faithful to my MEMORY of Froot Loops, so at the very least they are powerful nostalgia bombs.

As a display of self control, I actually did offer my wife one.  Since she is far more of an adult than I will ever hope to be, she graciously declined.  Her loss.

I probably shouldn’t go back to Carl’s Jr until these things have left the menu.  The urge to buy a couple of boxes and bring them home and pour milk on them is strong, and I think – no, I am certain – that I would regret the experience.

Posted in food | Leave a comment

On the Inexorable Passage of Time

Posted on September 3, 2018 by baudattitude

As I have occasionally mentioned, I am a geek of the age where my engeekening coincided with the rise of pencil & paper RPGs, so a good chunk of my formative years were spent compulsively reading, re-reading, and memorizing the many rule books for games like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Traveler… and, of course, Car Wars.

Car Wars is an alternate-future game, set in a world where a massive oil shock in 2000 leads to nuclear war in 2012, followed by general anarchy that lasts for several years and winds up with different regions of the US setting up very local governments with only a little bit of federal oversight and where slapping machine guns and rocket launchers onto the family vehicle is not only legal but an incredibly popular sport.  It’s closer to a “miniatures game” than an RPG, but as the game became more popular, the folks at Steve Jackson Games tried to make it a little more about the person behind the wheel and not ENTIRELY about the car you were driving,

Even so, the real fun of the game came from designing an endless assortment of impressively-weaponized death wagons, keeping at all times within space, weight, and cost budgets.

They did publish source books with sample cars, of course, such as this one below, but that was always a little dull compared to making your own.

As an aside, Car Wars made me ridiculously good at math for my age range.  I credit it with a lot of the advanced classes I got shoved into as a youth.

Anyway, part of the shtick of Car Wars was that it was always set 50 years in the future.  So, for example, they published a Car Wars calendar in 1988 that was labeled “2038”, and they published a magazine – Autoduel Quarterly – whose cover dates were always likewise a half-century ahead.  I own about six years’ worth of the magazine, so I can probably track the rough point where I stopped being super into RPGs by when I stopped buying it.

I have been on a bit of a scanning binge this year, as I’ve been converting papers and comic books and magazines into PDF files, and I finally dug my old ADQs out of a box in preparation for scanning.

Then I looked at the covers, and got socked in the gut by just how many years it’s been.

We’re 15 years away from actually catching up to these.  Barring any health issues, I am likely to pass these fictional future dates by.  This is a heck of a depressing thought for a Sunday evening.

(And I still cannot legally mount a flamethrower on my Mazda 3.  So very sad.)

 

Posted in organization, random | 2 Comments