18th Anniversary post?

Posted on March 3, 2025 by baudattitude

This blog launched on March 3rd, 2007.  It’s been a ride, and I figured that I should write something here to prove that I’m still alive.

It has been 18 years of very sporadic posting, and most of it has been about how bad I am at video games.  Occasionally I write myself notes about Unix shell scripting and media conversion tricks so I can look them up later when I’ve forgotten how I did it them the first time.

So why change?

Today I will talk about how I reached the point where I had mostly run out of New Content in Genshin Impact and naturally, rather than deciding it would be a good idea to find other things to do with my time, decided to start a second account so I could play through the story from the beginning.

That probably sounds like a bad idea, AND IT IS, but I have justification.

See, originally Genshin was a phone-only game and the controls were, well, I did not get on with them.  Also, while I had originally started it because my wife and I were looking for multiplayer games that we could try together, I quickly discovered that multiplayer doesn’t unlock until you’re a fair ways into it and was pretty limited in what you could accomplish as a duo.

So I played it for a day or two, and then put it down, and forgot about it until a collaboration was announced that brought Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn to the game, and played it just enough to get her in my party, and put it down again and again and…

So, while I started the game near launch, it took me nearly TWO YEARS to get through the version 1.0 storyline.  I’m pretty good at retaining plot details from games, but that was a stretch.

Also, there are a ton of characters that I had never tried out.  Building new characters in Genshin can be quite a time investment, particularly once you’re doing higher-level content and need to build a new character up to the same level.

So, yeah.  I justified starting all over, picking some characters I had not played, and swearing to myself that I would not get distracted by side quests.

It went pretty well, even with the unfortunate realization that I was going to be at the mercy of gacha RNG on top of my self-imposed restrictions.  Like, really short example of that – there are two places in the main story where you absolutely need to have a Pyro element character because something needs to be set on fire.  Like, no working around that I could find.

I did get two Pyro characters!  One was Amber, of course, and the other was from a gacha pull… but I had played her quite a bit previously.

In the end I buckled down and justified using Amber for both cases.  I mean, in theory I had used her on my original account… but had I ever really done much other than lighting torches with her?  I couldn’t remember, so I elected to throw my rules out for this instance.

This was repeated for the times I needed to kill the Oceanid boss.  It spawns waves of random enemies, and if it decided to spawn a wave of hawks it was an instant loss.  I didn’t have anyone who could hit them in the air and so they would just dive-bomb me to death.  So Lisa got some field time for that specific boss.

So, yeah.  I did cheat a bit.  When needed.  It’s not like money was riding on this, or anything.

In the end, I finished Natlan’s archon quest – catching completely up to the (main) story – in just over 18 days.  With quite a lot of hours played on most of those days.  That is a monstrous amount of content for a game, and is probably less than 20% of what the game has to offer.

I must point out that this is a free game.  Like, my deepest appreciation to the whales out there who are funding this for us peons in the cheap seats.

Anyway, here’s the dream team of characters I was fielding on that last day.  If you’re looking for any of these on a Genshin tier list, just scroll all the way to the bottom.  It will save you a lot of searching.

After a mad binge like that, I have Some Thoughts about how the game is designed. Not just how it’s designed from the point of view of being a psychological horror intended to extract money from people who are weak to cute waifus and FOMO… but some actual thoughts about how it’s structured, and how the developers have dealt with having a massive single-player game with hours and hours of cutscenes that also needs to be something you can stick in your pocket and haul out while you are commuting to your 9-5.

I won’t go into those today!  I may not go into them at all, because I’m very bad at following up on commitments, but maybe there will be some more words here tomorrow.  Or later this week.  It could happen.

 

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Wait, ANOTHER good Marvel game?

Posted on December 29, 2024 by baudattitude

A few weeks back, I got around to playing Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.  It was pretty good, and went a long way towards helping me forget how little fun I had with the Avengers game that had come out the year before.  Honestly, it was the most fun I’d had with a Marvel property since… when did No Way Home come out? Right after Endgame, so like 2019?  OK, 2019.  Maybe early 2020?  I’m not going to google it.

Regardless, I didn’t go into Marvel Rivals with any great expectations.  I was seeing a few people rave about it in a Discord I follow, but even the most vocal fans were admitting that it was pretty much an Overwatch clone with Marvel skins, and I thought I was completely DONE with Overwatch.  I used to play quite a lot of it, until Overwatch 2 came out, and I played exactly 2 games of Overwatch 2 and put down the controller for good.

It turns out that I wasn’t actually done with Overwatch, per se, or at least that I’m not done with NetEase’s take on the idea, because this thing is an absolute blast.  You have the same basic idea of having two teams of colorful characters that can be slotted into tank/dps/healer roles, simple objectives (move something from point A to point B sometimes, King of the Hill other times), and then everything in the middle is more or less chaos.

Oh, one other similarity to Overwatch.  I bought THAT game because I heard you could play as a moon hamster, then wound up playing Mercy almost every time.  Likewise, I downloaded this one because I heard that Squirrel Girl was a character and I have spent 100% of my time playing characters who are Not Squirrel Girl.

Well, let’s be even more specific.  I got to the character select menu and discovered this:

If you had the ability to go back to the mid 1980s and spy on me as a nerdy teenage lad, you would see that I was a big fan of Cloak & Dagger, a pair of superheroes that were… well, a super angsty duo with an origin story that pretty much comes across as a Say No To Drugs PSA.  But I was a simple teenager, the angst was a selling point, and I never expected to see them as playable characters in a game because honestly I figured Marvel had tossed them on the “not X-men, not Avengers, nobody cares” pile.

So the deal with this character duo in game is that Dagger is a healer, Cloak is a DPS, you can switch between the two of them with a button press and really it’s kind of like Mercy again where you had to swap between her staff and her pistol depending on your mood and whether your DPS players had completely abdicated their simple job of PEELING OFF YOUR D**M HEALER I’M BACK HERE GETTING MURDERED or not.

I’m not bitter.

So, honestly I can’t be objective about the game past this point.  It taps right into that nostalgia from my formative years and really it could be awful and I would still try to find good things to say about it.  I don’t THINK it’s awful, though.

As you might gather from the idea that they were able to find spots in the roster for a pair of, objectively, D-list heroes from the mid-80s, the range of playable characters is huge.  There’s over 30 of them, ranging from your obvious Hulk and Spider-hyphen-Man to ice-skating K-pop singers and an unbearably cute shark/dog THING named Jeff, and the size of the roster means that there is a lot of variety in the teams you see.

My one. Singular. SINGULAR complaint about the hero selection is that there really isn’t a “cute” tank.  So I’m not likely to try out the role any time soon, even if I do eventually get tired of Ty & Tandy.

I don’t think that will be terribly soon, though, because one thing Marvel Rivals does that is objectively better than Overwatch is that it gives lots of positive feedback to you if you’re healing.

Like, in hundreds of games played as Mercy, I got one (1) PLAY OF THE GAME moment with her.  That post-match spotlight was almost universally reserved for “oh, look. The Hanzo main pushed his Ultimate ability at a good time to kill four people”.  Sometimes tanks got it.  Healers pretty much did not, except occasionally Moira but even he/she/it usually got it as a reward for pushing the “ULT NOW” button and killing a lot of people.

I get it, there’s really no WOW factor to a clutch rez or to keeping a team vertical while the other guys are trying to convert them to horizontal.  I thought I was OK with it.

In just over 60 games of Marvel Rivals, I have gotten this screen four times:

And it’s a good feeling every time.

Healers also get nice little callouts on the post-game screen where you get to see your heal numbers and shiny little icons for the best healing and most assists.  I’m not always the top of either category, but even when I’m not I enjoy seeing the virtual thumbs-up.

I say that even IF it’s for the healer on the other team, and ESPECIALLY if it’s for the healer on the other team and they lost because they got stuck with a bunch of muttonheads.  I have had matches where I look at the post-game summary and I just want to send the opposing healer a big internet hug because they did everything possible to avoid the L but couldn’t.

That’s AFTER the match, of course.  DURING the match, getting a moment alone with an opposing healer mid-match is almost always going to result in me pushing the “Cloak now” button and trying very hard to send them back to their spawn point.

So.  Teenage nostalgia + actually respecting healers.  That’s a difficult to resist combo, and makes it even more difficult to be objective, so let’s get past me raving about this and move on to some other thoughts.  Specifically, the question of how they are paying for this thing.

Like, I play (too many) Asian gacha games, and their business model is pretty obvious.  Insert money, hope you get your particular flavor of waifu or husbando, occasionally lie to your friends about how you are 100% free to play and have NO IDEA how all these SSRs have just fallen into your account.

Marvel Rivals lets you play any character you want, from the moment you launch the game, with no strings attached as far as I can tell.  There are some cosmetic outfits you can buy, but the basic versions of every character are, well, already very good looking.  Like, aren’t the free characters supposed to be super plain and the thirsty versions locked behind a paywall?  Like, what is this madness?  I’m sure some people are going to drop the 15 or 20 bucks* on a skin for their favorite, but is it really enough?

Well, I guess… hopefully?  Like, I want to keep playing this.  So, you should all buy plenty of skins.  I will be over here, admiring your impeccable drip.

 

* I don’t actually know how much skins cost.  One thing this DOES take from the Gacha model is that you buy the skins with a currency that is itself exchanged for another currency, and THAT currency is the one you pay real life money for.  So while I THINK a “1600 currency” skin is probably around 20 bucks, I’m not sure.  They potentially could be dramatically cheaper or more expensive.

Posted in Overwatch, PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Circles, pretty good:

Posted on December 21, 2024 by baudattitude

So, last month I really wanted to get the new Genshin Impact cosmetics that you could only get if you launched the game on an Xbox, but I had just sold my Series X out of a desire to cut down on the number of plastic boxes under the TV.  So, I subscribed to GamePass Ultimate for a month which gave me the ability to launch Genshin via their cloud servers, and all was well.

Of course, paying Microsoft for a month of GPU JUST for this seemed kinda dumb.  So, I looked through their catalog of PC games and knocked out “Little Kitty, Big City” which had been on my radar for a little while.  It was pretty good, but I still felt like I needed to get a little more value for money.

Enter “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle”, a rare instance of a high-budget triple-A title that eschews the seemingly-mandatory online multiplayer and tacked-on GaaS elements of modern gaming in favor of giving you a solid single-player experience.

And it is, by the way, a very good experience and I firmly recommend it to any long-time fans of the movies.  Who are mostly, let’s face it, getting up in years and probably not super  likely to spend well upwards of 20 hours playing a game.

Like, the last decent “Indy” movie was 35 years ago.  If you’re reading this and just cringed, I’m sorry.  We’re old.

Self-pity aside, while I’m not sure whether Microsoft will ever make their money back on this, I have to give them some serious credit for the level of digital necromancy* on display here.  Digital Indy looks and SOUNDS like Harrison Ford in his prime, down to subtle mannerisms and intonations.

* Technically I realize Harrison Ford is still very much with us, and thus “necromancy” probably isn’t the right word.  I’m sticking with it.

Also, the plot – which starts with the theft of a seemingly minor object from a college museum, and naturally winds up dragging you all over the world – has all the pulp nonsense you would expect.  Like, of course you are going to be going from Rome to Egypt to the Himalayas and so on, and of course you are going to be fighting Italian Fascists and German Nazis the entire time and of course there is going to be some serious mystical stuff going down.  I fully expect any ’80s kid to be grinning like a madman through all of this.

The game’s structure works against it a little, in this regard.  While there are three levels that flow in a sort of linear rollercoaster  way, there are also three large and very open levels with subtests and exploration scattered all over.  The first couple of these were great, and I happily spent some hours really digging into them… but by the time I hit the third one I really wanted the story to be moving forward with a little more urgency.  Fortunately for anyone who, like me, started ignoring the side stuff at that point, you can always return to these levels after the end credits roll if you feel like cleaning them up.

Another thing that works against it, a bit, is the game’s combat.  This is very much a stealth and exploration game with lots of puzzles in it, and you can simply avoid most of the punchy punchy bits by finding the right disguise or dodging guards… but there are times where you’re going to be forced to bruise your knuckles a bit, and where it turns out that Indy has a bit of a glass jaw and the Other Guys have been hitting the gym, eating right and getting lots of sleep.  I did not do particularly well with these, but still managed to get through to the last boss with the combat difficulty pegged at “moderate”.

The last boss fight came very close to ruining most of the goodwill the game had built up to that point, and I was grateful for the option, after a dozen or so miserable failures, to go into the game options and turn on “auto parry on block” which allowed me to get through it .

I’ll probably feel much more forgiving about this after time has dulled the memory a bit.

Oh, there are firearms in the game as well.  Generally these are best avoided because the otherwise-fairly-lazy enemy AI is amazingly good at honing in on you as soon as you use one.

Besides, you’re not strictly limited to using your fists.  The game’s environments are littered with all sorts of things you can pick up and swing, and the bonk sound of whacking a Nazi with a frying pan is Deeply Satisfying.

I will say, however, that some of the media I’ve seen online where people take it upon themselves to kill Every Last Nazi in a level are… well, honestly they give moderately-serial-killer vibes.  Like, bro, I get it but at the same time like uh maybe take your murder down a notch.

Not like, too much.  Just a notch.

After that spate of complaining, I feel the need to also rave a bit about your companion in the game, because of course there is going to be a damsel in… well, generally not in distress, or at least not for very long at any given time.  I won’t spoil it too much but she’s 100% in the spirit of the best Indy companions and the banter between the two of them is, as they say, peak.

So to sum up.  Amazing game, combat a little frustrating at times, no idea how anyone thought spending probably a hundred million or more bucks on a masterpiece of Gen X nostalgia could ever be recouped but hopefully they make their money back somehow because I certainly appreciate their effort.

I think I have a week or so left on my GPU sub.  Maybe I’ll find another game to try.

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Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau : What the heck did I just play?

Posted on December 3, 2024 by baudattitude

So, I’m not the biggest fan of the phrase “So bad, it’s good”.  Like, I have a soft spot for the occasional objectively-bad piece of entertainment – I will defend the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie to my final days – but in general I’m of the belief that most bad things are, well, bad.

Then I play a game like Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau and it’s a nigh-religious experience while also being objectively one of the worst things I’ve ever spent money on.  Like, the controls were clunky, movement was slow, performance wasn’t great, the environments were made up entirely of canned assets, clipping through walls and other theoretically-solid object happened so often that I stopped noticing it, and in general it is such an unpolished game that I find myself stretching for an adjective that means “rough, but rougher than that”.

Despite that, I spent most of the game in a general semi-stunned state of “wait, did that just happen?” and wondering what would come next.

Put in simplest terms, it’s a very VERY low budget Call of Duty clone, except you’re not playing as the typical patriotic young lad out to distribute democracy to people who have the misfortune to live in whichever foreign country it’s politically-correct to hate this year.

Rather, you’re a young woman in a school uniform laying spirits to rest in rural Japan.

“Exorcist” conjures up images of, like, chanting and waving bells around and similar nonsense.  Shiraishi has no time for that.  Shiraishi has a big gun that kills ghosts.

And Shiraishi has a mission statement:

Look, “cute girl who swears a lot” is a trope that has been done plenty of times.  I’m not going to say it’s particularly novel.  I AM going to say that this particular iteration is a lot of fun.

One of the best metrics I have to tell me whether I am enjoying something is how often the screenshot key gets pressed.  If I’m just playing something more-or-less by the numbers, I’ll finish a game and there will be a screenshot for every time the game console automatically took one when I got an achievement, plus usually five to ten more for particularly epic bits or blatant fan service.

In the course of KSAB’s 4-hour campaign, I took 94 screenshots.  That’s just unprecedented.  I would share more of them, but… well, out of context, I don’t think they would be all that interesting and more importantly I think this is a game that people should play with as little information as possible going in.

You’re going to hate the controls, and you are probably going to hate a particular stealth mission about halfway through the campaign that represents the only real difficulty spike, but it’s worth it.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

WoW Accomplishments and dealing with timestamps in photos.app

Posted on December 1, 2024 by baudattitude

Two things that are mostly unrelated, but still a little related.

First, hit a nice milestone for the War Within and picked up the Ahead of the Curve achievement for the current season. The guild I’m in isn’t super hard core, so we’re usually a little slow to hit this – and the final boss of the raid was a real road block for us and made it even slower. We raid for 3 hours twice a week, and the last four weeks have been spent clearing the first seven bosses of the raid in the first hour to hour and a half of that and then spending the remaining time beating our heads into the final wall. We finally managed to clear her on the day after Thanksgiving, with 10 guild members and one shaman we picked out of Group Finder as we didn’t have 10 to start. He was a serious trooper and stuck with us through many, many wipes so thumbs up to our random shaman friend.

We’ll presumably keep clearing her for the rest of the season, but now at least we can skip several of the earlier bosses that we were only still doing because it was something to do that wasn’t bordering on self harm.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about is how the macOS Photos program handles importing image files, because recently I have been playing WoW on a PC rather than a Mac, and also playing a lot of other stuff on the PC, and this means that I have been generating a lot of screenshots on the PC. This has come with a host of issues.

The first is HDR. Taking a screenshot (alt+Prt Scrn) of any game that Windows is forcing into HDR mode gives me a horribly washed-out image. Taking a “capture” (Win+Alt+Prt Scrn) gives me a .png and a .jxr file, and while I usually can’t do much with the .jxr file at least it gives me a .png that usually looks pretty good.

UNLESS, and this is something I just discovered, UNLESS the game itself natively supports HDR. If this is the case, then anything captured with the “Capture” hotkey is really painfully dark and anything that’s captured with alt+Prt Scrn looks fine. This is why there’s only one screenshot on my earlier post about Guardians of the Galaxy, as an aside. I’m quite annoyed by this because the game is a real looker and I took a bunch of shots while I was playing it.

But, that’s only one of the issues. The other is that the easiest way for me to get the screenshots from my PC over to my Mac is to use OneDrive, and I’ve just recently discovered that this messes up the timestamps in a way that’s quite annoying.

When the files are downloaded from OneDrive to my Mac, they keep their time and date stamps… but when they are imported into Photos they get a new time and date stamp that reflects the time and date they were downloaded to the Mac from OneDrive, and I couldn’t figure out why for a while.

It turned out that macOS keeps track of a “Created” time stamp and a “Modified” time stamp, and “Modified” is what shows up in Finder while “Created” is what Photos uses when importing. When the files are downloaded to the Mac, the Created time and date are set to the time they hit the file system.

So I had to make a script to make the two match, which I will share here in case anyone else runs into similar:

for filename in *.*
do	
	modifiedtime=$(stat -f %m "$filename")
	touchtime=$(date -j -r $modifiedtime +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S)
	touch -d $touchtime "$filename"
done

My usual caveats here: This works for me and may not work for you. If it doesn’t work for you, and even if it does absolutely horrible things to your data, I’m not responsible.

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming, shell scripts | Leave a comment

What if… a Marvel game was actually really good?

Posted on December 1, 2024 by baudattitude

 

After selling both of my current-gen consoles, it felt like I should probably actually play something on the PC to justify the bold statements in my last post, and what I picked was the 2021 Eidos-developed/Square-Enix-published “Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy”, which is one of those titles that exists solely to annoy people who want to have things in alphabetical order.

For the record, if I did own the game in physical form it would be under “G”.

I don’t own it physically, though, which is a very good thing in this case.  See, I actually bought the Xbox version of the game a couple of years back, on deep discount, and didn’t realize at the time that I was also getting a Windows license.  “Play Anywhere” really is one of those features that Microsoft doesn’t advertise enough.

GotG came out about a year after “Marvel’s Avengers”, also from Square Enix though from a different development team.  I’ve played the Avengers game, for maybe six hours or so.  It was… let me be clear that this is a personal opinion, lest it have any super fans out there who find this some day… *I* found it to be really dull.  Like, you know those 16-bit platformers that you’d get in the 1990s where Ocean or someone bought a movie license and did the bare minimum to reskin a platformer with the characters?  It was like that, just with a multiplayer looter shooter.

OK, that is tremendously unfair to the Crystal Dynamics team.  You could tell that there was a lot of effort put into the game, but it just absolutely failed to click with me.

Anyway, after that experience you may assume that I went into GotG with a bit of trepidation.  I’d heard it was quite good, hence the reason I took a chance on it, but I was quite prepared to be disappointed.  It didn’t help that there had been three GotG movies, of varying qualities, and I wasn’t sure where the game fit in or if it even was part of the same continuity.

It turned out to be based on comics continuity and mostly unrelated to the movies, so that worry went away quickly… and just playing the first chapter was enough to erase my other concerns and get me settled in for the long haul.

It’s a really, really fun time.  I wasn’t going out of my way to scour the maps for collectibles, so it took me about 20 hours to see the ending credits, and I enjoyed, like, 99% of those 20 hours.  The 1% represents a single QTE in Chapter 3, which I will call out as being (a) a “press A to not die” where the specific action you’re supposed to take is not at all clear and (b) immediately follows an unskippable cutscene which plays every time you fail the QTE and need to start over.

Oh, and maybe 0.01% is reserved for a computer terminal you access late in the game that you cannot back out of if you are playing with a controller.  Like, literally you are stuck on a screen until you press the F button on your keyboard, and there is no prompt on the screen to indicate that this is even a key you can press.

So 98.99%.  That’s still pretty good.

Wait, no.  There were also two fights where the game wouldn’t let me progress until I had cleared every enemy and didn’t recognize that I had done this, so I wound up running around with the combat music playing on a loop until I gave up and used the “reload last checkpoint” option to go through the fight a second time. Do we call that .1%?

And there was one crash to desktop but I’m not even going to take off .01% for it because the game is very well checkpointed and it cost me, like, 2 minutes of progress.

Final “fun score” of 98.89?  Sure, let’s go with that.

The actual process of getting from Press Start to “Thanks for Playing!” is a pleasant third-person shooter with minor amounts of platforming, a couple of vehicle segments where you pilot the Milano, and a fair bit of environmental puzzle solving, typically in the guise of “that door is locked.  How make unlock?”

From a horribly-simplified viewpoint, I would say that it follows the basic design of “this level will have four or five small fights, with a boss at the end.  Stick some exploring in between the fights so players can catch their breath and get some variety”, which is a pretty common design.

I’m not too ashamed to admit that I did get stuck on some of the “How make unlock?” bits.  It wasn’t always entirely clear how I needed to move something or whether the something I was moving was related to the puzzle or just a side path that took me to a collectible item.  What I DID appreciate was that the game didn’t start barraging me with hints immediately, but let me poke at the puzzles by myself for a bit before my team members started making suggestions.

There were also one or two boss fights where I didn’t feel like I was making any progress and had to pause the game and go to a walkthrough to make sure that I was shooting the boss in the correct way.  Your milage may vary here, naturally, but personally I like that it let me get a little confused instead of being super hand-holdy.

I found the overall balance of exploring-to-shooty-bits to be pretty good, and the shooty bits benefited from a combat system that was fast-paced and maybe a little bit overwhelming in a good way.  You’re always in control of Star Lord, but you will usually have all four of the other Guardians on the field at the same time.  They will do generally-useful things, but you can also tell them to do SPECIFICALLY-useful things and it can be a little overwhelming to track when your team members can do something and when their skills are on cooldown.  Fortunately, they will yell at you if you haven’t given them a command for a while.

All of this is in service to a story that has no right being as emotionally-satisfying as it is.  Much like the first Guardians movie, it’s about five misfits who start off not particularly fond of each other and grow into a dysfunctional family by the end.  Yes, it’s cheesy as all get out, but sometimes cheesy is good.  It’s narrative comfort food and I am completely in support.

This doesn’t just come across in cutscenes and dialogue, either – while you are needing to manually order team members to do things in service of the exploration bits at the beginning of the game (“Groot! make a bridge here!” “Gamora, cut that thing”), they are just making bridges and cutting things without your direction and without making snarky comments by the time you hit the last levels.  It’s a really clever blending of gameplay elements and story.

tl;dr : me like.  Would recommend.  Press “F” to pay respects close terminal screen.

 

Posted in PC Gaming | Leave a comment

Nerd Purge, continued: rambling about PC gaming.

Posted on November 24, 2024 by baudattitude

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was in the process of thinning out computers and game consoles and, well, other technology that kind of piles up when you’re in the line of work I’m in and have the hobbies I have.

I wanted to take a second and talk about one of the reasons I’m having an easier time of that than I initially expected, and it pretty much comes down to the state of PC gaming today as compared to previous years.

I’ve been keeping track of the games I’ve finished, and the platforms I finished them on, for the best part of the last two decades.  Looking back at the earliest entries on my list, in 2007 and 2008, there aren’t a ton of PC games represented.  Part of that is that games simply weren’t being released for PC, and even the ones that were often had compromises – particularly when it came to controller support or weird compatibility issues on any version of Windows newer than Windows XP.

That said, it didn’t take long for PC GPUs to dramatically leapfrog the capabilities of the Xbox 360 and PS3 – so when games DID come out for Windows, they usually looked much better.  As a side benefit, controller support started becoming more of a Thing, thanks to Microsoft pushing the Xbox 360 controller as the default PC gamepad.

Still, looking back at the landscape before, say, 2020, you were really handicapped if you didn’t own a Sony console, and honestly a Switch was a good idea because Nintendo was really firing on all cylinders, and when you already have two boxes under the TV it kinda made sense to make sure there was an Xbox in there as well – particularly since the GPU scalping boom was at its peak, meaning that the best chance you had of playing games at their best involved owning an Xbox One X.

If we look back specifically at 2017, which I consider the best year for gaming in the last decade, I wrote a post where I talked about my favorite six games of the year.  (Horizon: Zero Dawn, Nioh, Nier: Automata, Doki Doki Literature Club, Mario Odyssey and Zelda BOTW).  Nioh didn’t get a PC port until months after the console version, Nier had a PC version that was a hot mess, Horizon didn’t see a PC version for three years, and Nintendo games are, well, Nintendo games.  That leaves DDLC as the only real “PC” title on my best-of list.

Or, well, Just Monika.

By 2020, all of those had quality PC versions… or could be trivially emulated on PC, in the case of the Switch games.

On the other hand, that was right about the same time that the Series X and PS5 hit the shelves and – dollar for dollar – punched WELL above their weight class.  And PC components were still being scalped, particularly thanks to Corona-chan moving half the world to work from home status.  So, I was still firmly on the console side of things.

Though, if I’m honest, even those weren’t getting a ton of use.  I finished a meager handful of games in both 2021 and 2022.  Wh0le lotta World of Warcraft and FFXIV being played, though.  Genshin, too.  Probably not the best use of time.

But, let’s stop the navel gazing and get on to 2024, since we’re there now, and I can start rambling about why 2024 has suddenly become the year when I looked at the consoles and said, “well, hmm… I guess I should keep a Switch around?  But these other boxes under the TV can go.”

Basically, it comes down to three things.  Well, two of them are closely related so maybe two and a half things?  But actually there’s a fourth thing though it isn’t as important.

Look, numbers are hard.  But let’s start with #1 and see where this takes us.

First, and most importantly, Japanese (and Korean, and Chinese) developers fell head over heels in love with Steam and with PC releases in general.  When I was going through the libraries of both my Xbox Series X and PS5, the only game of note that hadn’t received a PC version was Stellar Blade… and Shift Up has already promised a PC version for next year.  There’s still a bit of a lag from Sony – up to two years, in some cases – but since I’ve been pretty far behind the curve when it comes to new releases ANYWAY it’s not such a big deal.

Second, PC components got cheaper and you can buy a GPU again.  I assume mining for crypto is still a THING, but maybe it uses dedicated mining cards or something?  It doesn’t seem to be a factor in the consumer market.

You’re still probably going to have a hard time building a console-spec PC at the same price point as, say, a second-hand PS5, but that brings me to the third point:

The Steam Deck (and ROG Ally, and similar handhelds from Lenovo etc) are crazy popular now, and developers are absolutely tuning their games to work on them.  So, if you take the same amount of power found in one of these handheld devices and convert it to what it would cost if you built a desktop at the same specs… well, that equivalent desktop can be thrown together with some very inexpensive parts and now you have a reasonable low end  gaming PC today and your games will only look better as it’s upgraded in future.

Full disclosure: I did not do this, myself.  I have disposable income and I want shiny graphics.

Fourth, and honestly least importantly, Microsoft seems INTENT on making it so actually owning an Xbox console is …superfluous? Like, they can’t announce an Xbox game without pointing out that it’s coming to PC as well, and probably Playstation and possibly Switch.

Like, I’m not super into console wars but they seem to have completely thrown up the white flag and I’m just the tiniest bit salty.

I owned a Windows Phone.  I have the right to be salty about anything Microsoft does.

Anyway, that was a whole lot of rambling.  Thanks for reading this far, if you’ve stuck around.

Posted in organization, PC Gaming, Uncategorized, videogames | Leave a comment

Lore-Abiding Citizen, Again.

Posted on November 23, 2024 by baudattitude

It’s been 90 days since the launch of the most recent World of Warcraft Expansion, “The War Within”.  I thought I’d talk about it.

While I’ve technically – TECHNICALLY – been playing WoW since very shortly after the launch back in 2004, I have skipped huge chunks of the story.  I played for two or three months in 2004, picked it up again in 2016 for the Legion expansion and because I wanted to surprise my wife by making a pocket healer for her, then dropped it again until late 2020 when for some reason everyone had a lot of time on their hands and couldn’t go out very much.

Since 2020, I’ve been playing it more often than not, though I still take breaks for two or three months at a time during content droughts.  WoW has a lot of those, though they try very hard to have SOMETHING for people to do in-between major patches.

The War Within, or “TWW”, or “Warthin” is apparently a huge expansion in terms of fleshing out lore tidbits that have been hinted at over the course of the game, and unfortunately most of them are completely lost on me.  It’s still been fun, though!  The thing that keeps drawing me back to WoW is that they do group and raid content better than their competitors, and this expansion has been a joy in that regard.

I even took a few days to go through all of the side quests in the expansion for the “Loremaster” achievement.  It was an awful lot of flying back and forth through underground caverns running errands for… people? and I can’t say that there were any real highlights, but at least I can open up the world map and not see a bunch of yellow exclamation marks all over the place saying that someone has chores for me.

I said “people?” in the last sentence, because Warthin has an interesting premise and cast of characters.  See, back in the Legion expansion (2016), you could get this presumably-cursed dagger that would talk to you occasionally.  In the next expansion (Battle for Azeroth, 2018), they revealed that there was a creepy evil – if hot – chick in the dagger and she breaks out and tries to sell your soul to an evil god or something.

Anyway, while the creepy evil hot chick didn’t show up for a couple of expansions, she’s back and she has an evil plan which I… actually don’t know what her evil plan is, come to think of it.

I’m not sure if I don’t know what she really wants to do because it hasn’t been explained yet, or because I haven’t paid enough attention.

ANYWAY SHE’S EVIL so you gotta stop her, and whatever evil thing she’s doing is underground so you gotta pack up your stuff and head down there.

Along the way you need to help a bunch of different factions out with their personal problems.  You have a race of …robot dwarves?, a bunch of kobolds and goblins which we’ve seen before in WoW, some spider people which I think were enemies in a previous expansion but you’re all buddy buddy with them now, and some borderline zealots who are part of an empire that everyone thought died out a long time ago but has just been underground, or something?  I really feel like not playing the earlier expansions is impacting my enjoyment of interacting with all of these factions, but at the same time I can always ask my wife if I want to know what’s going on with them.

One of the best things about the spider people, by the way, is that Blizzard had the foresight to consider that some people are not very good with spiders and thus implemented an “Arachnophobia filter” which turns them all into lobsters and crabs.  It’s very funny to see lobsters hanging from the ceiling in exactly the way you would not expect to see lobsters hanging from the ceiling, and in short I strongly recommend the Arachnophobia filter.

I also strongly recommend playing the expansion, in general, because they absolutely nailed it in terms of having stuff to do to advance your character, by which I mean you have a bunch of numbers on your character sheet and there are almost always things you can do to make those numbers bigger.  Numbers get bigger, lizard brain get happy.

Impressively, they’ve even made avenues for antisocial or socially-anxious people to make the numbers bigger in ways that don’t involve other people.  You can play through all of the expansion’s dungeons with NPC companions, there’s a whole system of solo instances of scaling difficulty, and for – I think the first time? – you can even fight the final boss of the raid zone without involving 9 or more of your closest friends.

I mean, that last one doesn’t give you any items.  Blizzard’s not that generous.  But it does have a quest reward tied to it.

Also, Warthin added a system called “Warbands”, where certain actions on any character make numbers go up for ALL of your characters and adds a shared bank where you can pass certain special items back and forth between your virtual selves.  So, even if you’ve played the heck out of one character and are suffering a little burnout, you can just swap over into a new skin without feeling like you’re hampering yourself too much.

In short, if you have a lot of free time and are desperately looking for something to do with it, this WoW expansion is an excellent way to make it disappear.  Would recommend.  Turn on lobster mode for best results.

Posted in mac, MMORPG, PC Gaming | Leave a comment

This is the sort of thing you do for fun?

Posted on November 13, 2024 by baudattitude

So, I’m fortunate enough to be married to a colossal nerd.  While we aren’t 100% into the same things, there’s definitely a crossover between our respective interests, and it means we can understand each other even in the instances where our Venn diagram isn’t intersecting.

Like, for example, she has developed a real taste for danmei, or Chinese novels that are mostly set in fictionalized historical settings with a lot of pretty men doing pretty men things.  This is a bit of a niche fandom but has become more popular in the last few years, with a fair number of official releases.

Unfortunately, one of the publishers of these novels went unceremoniously and unexpectedly out of business this month, with the result that some of their books – which had never received eBook versions – went IMMEDIATELY out of stock on every online retailer.  This was annoying as she’d had them on her Amazon Wishlist but had been prioritizing other stuff above them.

A few days later, she mentioned that she had found the series that she really wanted to read on an online novel reading site, so problem… solved?  Well, sorta.

See, neither of us really trust that anything on the internet is really permanent, especially moderately dodgy sites serving up bootleg translations.  So ideally it would be nice to have a local copy.

That’s where the real fun started.

Naturally, these sites live and die on their content, so they have a vested interest in making it difficult to scrape.  I wasn’t able to copy the text off the site, and trying to save the novel as a PDF or webarchive would get me one or two chapters at a time.

Some quick googling led me to a GitHub for an unmaintained project called “Novel Grabber”, however, and this seemed very promising.  Problem was, it was literally a situation where I was downloading a random .jar file from a random GitHub site from 2021, and this did not feel like something I wanted to run on my everyday computer.

No problem, right?  Just drop it on a test box and… oh.  I just sold all of my spare test boxes.  Well, I guess it’s time to spin up a quick Rocky Linux VM.

To make this slightly briefer, I’ll put it in the form of a bulleted list.

  • Download Rocky 9 image.
  • Download VirtualBox.
  • Try to create VM.  Get checksum error.
  • Discover that VirtualBox has some conflicts installing Rocky 9.
  • Download Rocky 8.
  • VM creation success!
  • Try to set up shared folders in VirtualBox.  Requires VirtualBox Guest Additions.
  • Try to find VirtualBox Guest Additions, the answer is to unzip the VirtualBox installer as they are available on an .iso file inside the installer.
  • Try to install VirtualBox Guest Additions from this .iso.  Fails because of lack of kernel headers.
  • Install kernel headers and now Guest Additions compile.
  • Create shared folder, get permissions errors trying to access it in Linux.
  • Discover that using shared folders in Linux in VirtualBox requires adding user to vboxsf group.
  • Google how to do this in Rocky.  Discover Rocky has a tool called “Cockpit” for system management.
  • …which isn’t installed by default.  Download and install Cockpit.
  • Now I can access shared folder.  Copy the Novel Grabber tool to the Linux box via shared folder
  • Run tool.  No Java installed by default.  Install Java.
  • Run tool again.  GUI won’t launch for some reason.  Figure out command line options.
  • Run tool again, with command line options, pointing it at the specific novel she wants to read.
  • Success! I have an epub file containing the entire text of the novel.  That only took, well, two or three hours and about a dozen open tabs where I was googling error messages as they popped up.
  • …oh, and it’s missing the cover image.  I guess I can probably add one via Calibre.  BUT FOR NOW, I am classifying it as a Great Success and totally worth the very educational amount of effort this entailed.

This is totally the sort of thing that normal people do for fun, right?

 

 

 

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Nerd Purge 2024

Posted on November 10, 2024 by baudattitude

It’s been a year.  But not all in a bad way!

I was laid off at the end of September… but it was the kind of layoff where you get a huge severance package and where “getting back to work” was not an immediate priority.  I’ll be looking for something probably in January.

In the meantime, I have been doing a massive cull of hardware.  I had …an uncomfortable number of surplus PCs and Macs that were being used as test boxes and for duplicating customer scenarios.  I don’t have them anymore.   I still have, mmm, 3 PCs and 2 Macs and I recognize that there is still room for reduction there.

I also got rid of my Xbox Series X and have the PS5 disconnected and ready to go to GameStop.  We still have three Switches, two Vitas, an Xbox 360, a PS3, a PSP and a 3DS so it’s not like we don’t still have entirely too many dedicated gaming systems around, but this will be the first time in nearly 30 years that I have not owned either the current Xbox OR the current PlayStation or (more commonly) both at the same time.

This is only possible because so many games have come to PC.  In fact, that’s why I still have the 360 and PS3 – there are a lot of games from that generation that are stuck on those hardware platforms.  I probably should go through and see whether I can get rid of some of the remaining systems via emulation.  I think Xbox 360 emulation is still rather behind the curve, but the rest of the systems may be feasible.

Interestingly, a number of Xbox games turned out to have come with PC licenses – games like Gotham Knights, or Mortal Kombat 11, or the Ninja Gaiden collection.  I initially thought this was because they were GamePass titles, but it’s been a couple of weeks since my GamePass subscription lapsed, and I still have them.

I had a mild burst of annoyance when I watched the Genshin Impact 5.2 preview program and they mentioned that there would be a special wind glider given away to people for playing on the Xbox, but they have since clarified that this will be available via other platforms as of 5.3.

Anyway, I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress in just the last couple of months.  Maybe I’ll even hold on to this momentum for a while.

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