One more Movies Anywhere post

Posted on November 5, 2017 by baudattitude

So, for a service that launched only a few weeks ago, Movies Anywhere has been… well, it borders on Just Working, which is amazing considering all the normal drama that comes out whenever the motion picture industry intersects with the internet.

I still have a couple of films refusing to move from my iTunes library TO Movies Anywhere, but I have a ticket open with the MA support team and they’ve said that their mysterious “Tier 2” support group will get those taken care of for me, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut finally synced over from MA to iTunes on Thursday, so really the only outstanding issue that’s all that confusing is Superman: The Movie.

Of course, one of the biggest things helping my digital movie library expand is that Vudu is one of the partners.  It turns out that they have a couple of programs that are really very consumer friendly, and now that they’re no longer tied to Ultraviolet I can take advantage of them.

I’ve already raved a bit about Disc to Digital, which has let me upgrade a bunch of films that were only ever released on DVD to high definition versions, but I decided to give their Instawatch program a try as well.  Instawatch is a service where you buy a movie from Walmart – not every movie, mind you, it’s limited – scan your receipt with the Walmart mobile phone application, and you get a Vudu license for that movie.  This then ports to Movies Anywhere etc.

So, I bought this thing for $9.96:

Then I scanned the receipt while I was putting the rest of the groceries in the trunk of my car, drove home, and checked the various movie services to see what exactly I’d wound up with and where.

My Vudu library just had this sort of generic placeholder art.  Not very exciting:

…but, expanding it showed that I now owned the three Mad Max movies worth mentioning (OK, I’ve never actually seen the first film in its entirety, so I shouldn’t be too flippant about that), but only in SD quality.  I could upgrade each to HDX, but at about 15 bucks a movie I wasn’t likely to do that.

Likewise, streaming Fury Road from the Movies Anywhere app also played back at SD quality.

On the other hand, when I brought up my iTunes purchase library, all three movies showed up with HD versions available, and I was able to download nice 1080P versions.  Since my primary media library just happens to be iTunes, this is the most desirable result.

Mind you, even if I hadn’t gotten the upgrade during the push from MA to iTunes, this still would have been a deal, and the ability to just scan a store receipt and get the licenses automatically pushed to digital movie lockers is pretty futuristic, but the bonus upgrade to HD?  Two thumbs up.

 

 

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Neunundneunzig Rückstandspiel

Posted on November 4, 2017 by baudattitude

So, a couple of weeks ago, I did another pass through my backlog to eliminate games, and that got me under the hundred mark for the first time in… well, probably since the first time I fell prey to the siren call of the Steam sale.

It was a pretty neat feeling!

Then, I realized that I wasn’t REALLY under the hundred mark, because I’d never entered any of the games I’d brought home from Japan, and there were a couple of cheap bundles that I’d picked up, and I decided that I was going to be honest and put those in.

This pushed the backlog number right back up to a little over 120.  And there was great despair.

Still… I had an awful lot of short hidden-object games and visual novels in that number.  Surely it couldn’t take me too long to knock out a few of those?

Anyway, long story short, I have gone through a LOT of single-use crowbars recently.  I also want to share one of the weirder things I’ve ever seen in a hidden-object scene, from Brave Giant’s “Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt”:

That there on the bottom right is a Commodore 1530 Datasette, and it gave me a super warm fuzzy feeling to see it showing up in one of these jumbles of random crap.  Whoever was responsible for the art here, kudos for giving me a happy flashback to my misspent youth.

So!  Only 99 games left in the backlog, that should take virtually no time at all… well, it wouldn’t if they were all similarly sized single-serving affairs.  Sadly, I’m completely out of HOGs, so this may take a little longer.

 

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On Seasonal Snackfoods

Posted on October 28, 2017 by baudattitude

So, if you’re a fan of Pumpkin Spice flavored… THINGS, the weeks or so between October 1st and Thanksgiving are some of the best weeks of the year, because this is the time when you can get any damn thing you want in a “Pumpkin Spice” version.  After Thanksgiving, of course, it switches to Peppermint – and, while I am not personally a huge peppermint fan, I don’t begrudge those freaks their month of everything-is-minty.

Then, of course, January rolls around and the supermarket stockers of the world breathe a sigh of relief and get back to just sticking the normal versions of things on the shelves.

Today, however, I was grocery shopping and ran across something that rather puts a stick in the spokes of the holiday flavor wheels:

Now, I’m pretty neutral on the topic of candy corn.  I live with a woman who is a huge fan, so every year I buy her a bag of the proper stuff, and I’ll take a piece or two if offered, but it’s neither something I seek out nor something I am particularly offended by.  I realize that, for many, candy corn is an Abomination In The Eyes Of Man And Gods Alike. something I usually ascribe to childhood trauma revolving around trick-or-treating.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of telling my body that it has been bad and that I am going to punish it by making it eat weird things.  So, I bought a box of these.

First off, the money shot:

Orange-ish filling, as promised, and a few sprinkles to add a festive air to the things and to fall off when you try to take a bite.

Flavor, well, that’s a tricky question.  I’m not sure they’re particularly candy corn flavored – there’s really just a generic sort of “sugary” taste to them that COULD be candy corn flavor or could just be, well, sugar.  It actually had me wondering whether candy corn itself has a flavor or if the only thing that makes it candy corn is the sort of waxy texture.

So, I went to the expert.

Her conclusion was likewise that they just sort of taste like regular vanilla cupcakes, but she also pointed out that I hadn’t yet brought home any candy corn this year and obviously I needed to go back to the store and bring a bag home so she could perform an action she described as “empirical testing”, a phrase I assume is a euphemism for “eating a massive amount of sugar, FOR SCIENCE”.

I may have created a monster.

 

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On the hazards of homonyms

Posted on October 28, 2017 by baudattitude

So I’ll just sum up a couple of conversations between me and my long-suffering wife over the last few weeks:

First conversation, some while ago:

Me: “Hey, I ordered a Switch off Amazon”

Her: *vague grunt of assent*

Second conversation, Friday morning:

Me: “Hey, my Amazon package with the Switch got delivered to the work mailroom, I’m going to go in and pick it up and run a couple other errands”

Her: “OK”

Third conversation, Friday afternoon:

Me: “Hey, check out our new Switch!”

Expected response:

ACTUAL response: “Um, when you said you were ordering a switch, I thought you meant:”

(Thankfully, she is not actually mad at me.)

Sooooo… I could have been a little more clear.  OK, considerably more clear.  Like, maybe sticking “Nintendo” somewhere in any of our previous conversations would have been a fantastic idea.  Pro-tip for all my readers, especially if you are not blessed with a wife of this caliber.

Posted in random, videogames | 1 Comment

Doki Doki Literature Club

Posted on October 28, 2017 by baudattitude

On the advice of, well, it seems like pretty much the entire Internet, I decided to give Doki Doki Literature Club a try.

Going in, I only knew two things:

First, that it presented itself as a sort of pink-fluffy-cotton-candy romance VN, the normal sort of “hapless Joe winds up surrounded by cute girls and falls in love” story.

Second, that this was entirely untrue, and that it was going to be all kinds of messed up.

It turns out that both are true, and also that you really shouldn’t know any more than that when you play through it.  I realize that this is not a terribly convincing argument for trying it out, but if you don’t trust me, please trust everyone else on the Internet who are singing this game’s praises.

You can get it from Steam, or from the developer’s own site, and it will cost you exactly zero dollars from either place.

PS.  Yuri best girl.

Posted in mac, videogames, visual novels | 4 Comments

Three Little HoGs

Posted on October 27, 2017 by baudattitude

Hidden-object games are a genre that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention in gaming media, because they’re almost entirely aimed at adult women and most people who write about games are a) men and b) young, or at least never grew up.  The Venn diagram of these two demographics is basically a pair of circles several feet apart from each other on a very large piece of paper.

I’m not denying that I fit the “never grew up” category.

Moreover, with how politicized gaming has become in the last few years, they’re awkward exceptions to a lot of arguments, so there’s real motivation to pretend they don’t exist.  They almost always have women protagonists, who are generally in interesting jobs, there’s very little violence in them, and most of them are developed in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, so they come out of some of the poorest countries in the world.  When your narrative is that the games industry is overrun by Californian tech bros making male power fantasies, HoGs are… inconvenient.

Mostly, I like them because they make me feel like I’m actually using that grey mush I keep between my ears for something other than deciding which particular bad guy I’m going to shoot next.  They almost all have a nice mix of needing to sort through screens full of junk looking for the Right Doohickey To Advance The Plot and needing to solve puzzles to open doors so you can get to the next screen full of junk.

I am somewhat simplifying things here, mind you.  In a similar way, you could describe traditional adventure games as filling your inventory with random junk and then rubbing every piece of random junk up against everything else in the world in the desperate hope that doing so will advance the plot.  I think I stole that description from Yahtzee, it’s too clever for me to have come up with it on my own.

Anyway, I spent a few hours this week playing through the first three games in Artifex Mundi’s “Grim Legends” series, and had a good time with all of them.  There are no connections between any of the games – the first has you traveling to your sister’s wedding and discovering that there is Something Very Wrong With The Groom, and also your sister is abducted by a bear, the second has you playing a doctor who winds up in the middle of The Brothers Grimm’s The Six Swans (actually, there are SEVEN Swans, and an evil peacock), and the third has you playing an amnesiac member of a Mysterious Order of monster hunters who all look rather like characters from the Assassin’s Creed series and, well, hunt monsters.  Mysteriously.

As descriptions go, I didn’t exactly stick the landing there.  I recognize this.  What I’m trying to get at is that you rarely know exactly what you’re getting when you start one and that the stories can be quite unusual at times.

Grim Legends 3 is a bit of an odd duck, because it’s the first HoG I’ve played that has “twitch” elements.  There’s a spell/counterspell combat system that involves matching runes against opponents, and many of the achievements are time-based.  These games are usually VERY relaxed affairs with no demands on your reaction time, so it stands out.  It made playing through the story more interesting, for sure, though I don’t think every HoG needs to add similar systems.

All of them have little side stories you can play after the main game, either little sequels or just extra information on the characters you meet in the game.  They tend to be things you can knock out in an hour or so, so they’re really just there if you liked what you played through and want to see some more of it.

Alternately, you can ignore the plot, skip all the cutscenes, and just bounce from puzzle to puzzle until you are temporarily inconvenienced by end credits rolling and need to go and start another one.  This is made easy because older HoGs frequently wind up bundled for pennies on the dollar at Indiegala, Groupees, or Humble Bundle.

So… if you’re HoG-curious, those are good places to check out.  Some Artifex Mundi games have even been showing up on the PS4 and Xbone, though I’m not sure how well they could possibly work with a controller.  I personally use a Surface 3 for my HoG sessions and I think they work really well with a touch interface.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | 3 Comments

Lost a gaming buddy

Posted on October 24, 2017 by baudattitude

For some reason, our neighborhood seems to get more than its share of stray cats, and most of them are terribly cautious of people.  Occasionally, one of them will pick our back porch as a place to hole up, and we tend to put out food when we see the same face around for more than a few weeks.

One of these strays, a big black cat who wound up with the name of Ned due to some confusion with another cat, lived under our back porch for a couple of years before he decided that he would rather be inside, which he communicated by simply walking into our kitchen and sitting down as if he’d always been an indoor cat.

Anyway.  We had a good few years with Ned – sometimes he would want to be indoors for days, sometimes he would decide to be an outdoor cat again and only show up for meals, but he was always a terribly friendly cat.  He had a few old battle scars when we met him, including a doozy of an ear notch, but he’d mellowed at some point and we never actually saw him get in any fights.  He was, mind you, of a size where other cats probably didn’t want to start any trouble.

Then he started losing weight, fast, and we had a long and depressing conversation with a couple of vets who told us, basically, to keep him as happy as we could for the time he had left.  That was last October.

He kept losing weight, and hair, and energy in general, but he was always happy to be on a lap and just camp out for hours at a time.  I played a lot of games with him this last year, with him always being very patient – even when I got to the Wii games and started frantically waving Wiimotes and nun-chucks just over his head.  He was utterly unflappable.

We finished Pandora’s Tower together, but he was having a rough time of things.  He was starting to wobble a lot when he’d jump down from chairs, and he didn’t really want to eat anything – I’d give him wet food, and he would lick all the gravy off it and leave the solids.

So, we arranged for a local vet to come to us and give him a peaceful exit, and then we spent his last few days just hanging out and watching movies together.  Fewer controllers flying around in his airspace, more time being petted.  It was kind of like stroking a barely-padded skeleton with all the weight he’d lost, but he didn’t stop purring.

It’s been a weird few days since.  He was sick for so long that going from a house with Ned in it to a house without hasn’t come with any drastic shocks, but I’m still seeing the occasional phantom black streak out of the corner of my eye and none of our other cats understands that a human sitting down and picking up a controller means that there will be a lap available for the next several hours – or they may just not have realized that Ned isn’t around and that there’s a position waiting to be filled.

Sorry for the downer post, folks.  I’ll be back to my typical nerdy ranting shortly.

Posted in random | 4 Comments

Experimenting with Disc-to-Digital and Movies Anywhere

Posted on October 16, 2017 by baudattitude

Not much to talk about on the games front right now – I’m slowly grinding through Pandora’s Tower and am almost done with tower 10, so getting to the end game – so today’s post is about another of my recent distractions, which is experimenting with Vudu’s disc conversion system and seeing how it ties in to Movies Anywhere and thence into iTunes.

That was one sentence.  Lot of subordinate clauses, sure, but only one period.  I’m not sure if my high-school English teachers would be proud or sad.  I’m not sure whether high-school should be hyphenated.  I may be getting off-topic.  I’m pretty sure off-topic is hyphenated.  ANYWAY.

So, when doing disc-to-digital conversion, the ideal case is that you put a shiny DVD or BD into your computer’s optical drive, or scan a UPC if you don’t have an optical drive, then push a button and have a validation server confirm that this disc that you put in is X movie and for a small fee you can have the right to download a copy from your service of choice.

Actually, that’s not the IDEAL case.  The ideal case is that the validation server looks at your disc and says that you can have an even better version of the movie.

I’ve gone through probably a hundred assorted discs so far.  I haven’t been converting all of them, mind you, just seeing what some of them offer, and the results have been… well, they’ve been OK but not perfect.  I thought I’d share some data points here.  Movies in release order just because.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Probably one of the very few films where one of the stars killing and eating the other actors was a real possibility, Bringing up Baby was never released on Blu-ray, but scanning the DVD gave me an option to upgrade to hi-def for $5.  Ideal.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Not my disc, but a friend’s. He reports that scanning the 1962 version gives the option to buy the 1935 version. The 1935 version is well thought-of, but still this is Not Ideal. 

Charade (1963)

This is a movie that languished in public-domain hell for years, until Criterion released a $40 DVD version in 1999.  I own it.  It’s a non-anamorphic DVD, so it’s even lower resolution than usual.  Putting the disc into a computer gave me the option to buy “The Truth About Charlie”, which was a remake done in the early 2000s.  I’ve never seen The Truth About Charlie, but it wasn’t what I was after.  Scanning the UPC, however, gave me the option to buy an HD version of the film.  Ideal, possibly even more ideal for giving you the option to get a second movie on the cheap. 

How to Steal a Million (1966)

Probably my favorite Audrey Hepburn movie, but I’ve always had a soft spot for heist-comedy movies in general.  Another movie that never got released on Blu-ray but gave me the option to upgrade to HD when I scanned the disc.  Ideal.

Superman: The Movie (1978)

Vudu recognized this movie perfectly, and gave me the option to buy an HD version of the film – not a bad upgrade from a DVD that came out 17 years ago!  Weirdly, Movies Anywhere does not have this movie in their library, so it didn’t port to MA.  Superman II does exist in the MA library, and I now have an HD copy across all services, but this one is Not Ideal at the moment.

Blade Runner (1982)

I have the five-disc BD set, and scanning the UPC gave me the option to get a digital copy of the theatrical cut.  Fortunately, putting the first disc into my computer’s optical drive gave me the option to get the Final Cut version, which then synced to MA and from there to every service except iTunes.  From some browsing around, I’m not the only person with this problem so hopefully it will be fixed soon.  Almost Ideal.

Aliens (1986)

Scanning this BD gave me the choice of buying either the theatrical or extended versions of the film.  It’s fairly unique in that regard – the other discs I tried that were extended versions were Alien, Alien 3, The Replacement Killers, Dark City, and Terminator 2, and all of those movies only gave me the option of the theatrical cuts.  So, Ideal for Aliens, not a good showing for most other movies with alternate versions.

The Running Man (1987)

Even for an 80s action movie, this one was a little cheesy.  Still, sentimental value because it’s the first R-rated movie I saw in a theater without adult accompaniment.  Redeemed fine with disc to digital but did not port to Movies Anywhere, so there may be some rights issues.  Not Ideal.

Predator 2 (1990)

Speaking of sorta-cheesy action movies… the disc failed validation, but scanning the UPC gave me a $2 HD version.  Ideal.

Titan A.E. (2000)

DVD scanned and offered an HD upgrade.  There are a lot of animated movies from the early 2000s that have never been released on Blu-ray, so if you want an HD version of this or things like Over the Hedge, Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, etc, digital copy services are your best hope.  Ideal.

Harry Potter, various (2001-2011)

I had digital copy codes for the final three movies, but the first five scanned perfectly and migrated to all services.  Ideal.

The Time Machine (2002)

Scanning either the disc or the UPC give the same result here, an offer to buy a digital copy of the 1960 The Time Machine movie.  Not fantastic if you like the Guy Pearce version, but the 1960 movie is pretty good too.  Not Ideal, unless you prefer the older movie and don’t own it already.

Hellboy (2004)

Scanning the disc gave me the option to buy a digital copy of The Punisher (2004) but scanning the UPC resulted in the correct film. Ideal, even more ideal if you want a cheap copy of a completely different movie as well.

Appleseed: Ex Machina (2007)

Scanned properly but only gave me the option to buy an English-dubbed version.  Not Ideal.  Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society was similar.

I’ll stop going through movies now, assuming that you’ve even read this far, and sum up my results as I see them:

If you are scanning a reasonably-recent movie that has only one version, and have both the UPC and the disc handy, you have a really good chance of getting what you want.  If you’re scanning a movie that was never released on Blu-ray, you actually have surprisingly high odds of being able to buy a HD version.  If you’re scanning a movie with multiple cuts available, you are probably going to get offered the theatrical cut, likewise foreign movies will probably only give you an option for the English dub.  Also, if you’re doing this for the purpose of filtering your movies through Vudu and then to Movies Anywhere and to your digital movie storefront-of-choice, you need to check whether Movies Anywhere actually knows about your movie before scanning. 🙂

Oh, and there are a few cases where the system will process your disc and be absolutely sure that it’s a different movie.  Those are pretty rare, though.

 

Posted in movies & tv, organization | Leave a comment

Finally, digital movie sanity

Posted on October 14, 2017 by baudattitude

If you read back through a few years of posts here – mind you, I can’t recommend actually reading the last ten years of posts, but let’s assume that you are very very bored – you will see the chronicles of a guy who really wanted to move all of his movies off of discs and into digital form so they could be stored on a server and accessed without needing to get up off the couch and look for discs.

Also, I had several bookshelves full of DVDs and there is something really pathetic about a living room that looks like a video store.

Most movies these days come with a digital copy code.  That wasn’t always the case, and I know far too much about DVD ripping and encoding as a result.  Not all movies come with a code I can use in iTunes, however, and this is annoying because a) I have a pretty substantial investment in Apple-branded gadgets and b) UltraViolet, the “not-iTunes” alternative is… well, it’s always struck me as something designed by committee, with far too many compromises.  iTunes codes let me download a local file, and I like having local files.

About 3 years ago, Disney came up with a neat idea – “Disney Movies Anywhere” – which let you redeem your digital copy codes in one central location and gave you access to your movies on your provider-of-choice.  It also tied into Disney’s rewards program, and over the years I have gotten a few free blu-rays out of the whole deal.

Oh, and if you BOUGHT a Disney movie on your digital provider-of-choice, that movie would sync back to Disney Movies Anywhere and then to your other sites.  So, even though I pretty much only use iTunes, I was able to snag a couple cheap movies off Google Play and have them sync over to iTunes.

As of last week, however, the “Disney Movies Anywhere” program has been rebranded to “Movies Anywhere” and now has most of the major studios on-board.  Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM are the significant holdouts, but having Warner, Sony, Universal, and Fox means that we are very close to a buy-once-play-anywhere future.

Two more things that are particularly good for me from this:

One, Vudu is a supported retailer for Movies Anywhere.  This doesn’t mean a lot by itself – though I suppose I can start looking at Vudu sales – but it means that I can take advantage of their “Disc 2 Digital” program, where I stick a disc into my computer, their software scans it, and then I can get a digital copy for $2… or, if I have a DVD and want an HD version, that will set me back five bucks.

I didn’t upgrade most of our DVDs to blu-ray because paying 20 or 30 bucks per disc was nuts.  I still won’t upgrade most of them to high def, but at only $5 per I am upgrading some of them.

Second, not being a fan of UltraViolet, I never redeemed any UV codes.  They have expiration dates printed on them, so I didn’t think they’d actually work…

…but apparently the expiration dates are more like guidelines.

The bottom two codes are actually from Warner’s digital copy program, pre-Ultraviolet, and I have a vague memory of trying to redeem them some years ago and being told that they were past their sell-by date, as it were.   It seems that they got a second life.

Oh, and third: Many of the older digital copies I had were SD copies.  A side effect of linking iTunes into MA is that those movies got free upgrades to HD.  I like free upgrades.

So, big thumbs-up from this geek.  Now they just need to get those last few studios into the program.

 

Posted in movies & tv, organization | Leave a comment

Onwards to 101

Posted on October 10, 2017 by baudattitude

Knocking out Metroid: Other M and Cursed Mountain got my Wii backlog under double digits, so – on a reader recommendation – I decided to pull Pandora’s Tower off the shelf to keep pushing that number down. It’s a fantasy-setting action RPG that I really only knew about because it got localized as part of “Operation Rainfall” back in the day, so I went in pretty much blind. 

This is not what I expected out of a Wii game. It’s a mash-up of Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus and Song of Saya and I don’t know what all else.  

Those are all good things, as an aside. 

I’ve only put a couple of hours in, with no complaints other than a spot of frustration related to an in-game timer – basically, you progress through a series of 12 dungeons, with a limited time before you need to either kill the boss or go back to your home base to feed an NPC, and blowing the timer means a GAME OVER with a really dark ending. 

As I found out. 

As you explore each dungeon, though, you unlock shortcuts for subsequent runs, making the timer less of an issue. I’d prefer no timer at all, but it’s a reasonable compromise. 

So far, I’m loving it. More as I get deeper in.

Posted in videogames, Wii | Leave a comment