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.

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

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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The Computers of CODBLOPS6

Posted on October 30, 2024 by baudattitude

I’ve been a subscriber to Microsoft Gamepass for a few years now, but never a heavy user.  So, between my most recent annual subscription expiring and the recent price increase I figured it might be time to let it rest for a bit.

Before that, however, I wanted to catch up on some of the games that came over to Gamepass as part of the Activision acquisition, including the most recent Call of Duty game: Black Ops 6.

Quick summary of my thoughts: I pretty much only play CoD for the single-player campaign and the Black Ops series usually nails that.  I particularly enjoyed Cold War for the deep 1980s nostalgia hits, and BLOPS6 takes that into very early-90s nostalgia.  Good times, strong recommend.

HOWEVER.  Not 10 minutes into the game, I got blindsided by this:

That is an IBM PCjr, cartridge ports and all, with the PCjr monitor and the PCjr keyboard.  Not the chiclet one they initially released, thankfully, but the proper one they gave out free as an apology.  It should not be on ANY desk in a business environment, let alone in 1991, but I have to love that someone felt the need to faithfully model it and slip it into this scene.

Naturally I then spent the next eight hours or so taking screenshots of random computers and tech items and occasionally shooting bad guys to get to the next area with random computers and tech items in it.

So what follows is a collection of a bunch of screenshots and a whole lotta snark.  I suspect I am writing this mostly for myself, but if anyone else of a certain age stumbles across this they might enjoy the snark as well.

Let’s get started.

These generic PC/XT and PC/AT clones show up a lot in the game, sometimes with this same generic probably-monochrome-VGA monitor sitting on them.  There are actually several different monitor models in the game.

The mouse feels a little anachronistic, and not just because it’s wireless.  I feel like it’s a variant of the Microsoft Mouse that wasn’t sold yet in 1991.

BIG kudos to the graphics team for remembering that mice of this vintage should not have a scroll wheel.  That’s a pet peeve of mine for anything set pre-1998 (Captain Marvel, I am looking at you).

Less generic, and actually just plain WEIRD is this Frankenstein’s abomination of a computer.  The back half of it is plainly an Apple ][ of some variety (it’s a //e in this case, I’ll get back to that) but then it has a generic PC/XT front panel slapped on just where the keyboard should start.  Also you get a Monitor ][ and an IBM PC/XT keyboard.  It’s not the original 5150-bundled keyboard as it doesn’t have the terrible enter key.

Also there’s a printer here.  This specific model shows up a lot in the game.  Unlike monitors, they didn’t really feel the need to make a wide variety of printers.

I originally thought it was an Okidata printer of some variety, but I can’t find any models that match.  That may just be my internal bias of “generic ugly printer = Okidata” at work.

These two laptops show up… not often?  But occasionally.  Whenever they need to put a laptop in a scene, you’ll see one of these.  I was going to ding them for what I thought was a Windows key on the keyboard of the right-hand laptop, but I found a closeup where it turned out to be a Fn key.

This little minitower also makes frequent appearances.  Usually it’s on its side with the side panel missing.  I like the very appropriate interfaces on these screens.

 

This PC tower is the most modern-looking computer.  It doesn’t have a 5.25 inch floppy drive at all, and DOES have a tray-loading CD-ROM drive.  Honestly, this is pushing things for 1991.

It shows up in a couple of versions, one with the door open like this and one with it closed.

I thought this was modeled after something in the IBM PS/2 line of computers, but I can’t find any of those that had a front panel door like this.

 

This AT-format keyboard shows up very often.  Again, huge credit to the graphics team for remembering that the Windows key did not exist in 1991.

There are a lot of 3.5″ floppies on desks in BLOPS6.  Very often they are next to computers that only have 5.25″ drives.  As far as I noticed, there is only one 5.25″ floppy shown in the game, though – and again mad props to the team – it’s shown in a flashback, suggesting that it was several years prior to 1991.

Interesting mix of tech here.  There’s a very old cell phone, what I suspect is a Betamax player (despite the stack of VHS tapes), and an early CD audio player.  The CD player makes a few more appearances throughout the game.  There are also several different VCRs that show up.  Some of them, fittingly, show “12:00” as the time.

A different VCR (probably VHS this time?), some old TVs, a radio receiver and … lord almighty, is that an 8-track deck?  Like, did a 3D modeler in the 2020s really spend a day carefully crafting a 3D model of an 8-track player?

I think they did.

These external caddy-loading SCSI CD-ROM drives also show up a lot, but this is one of the few times I was able to get a really good look at the back.   Really impressed by the detail here.  I forget what that DIN connector was used for, but I know that it’s period-appropriate.

A very rare absolute miss on the part of the art team.  CD-RWs weren’t a thing until several years later.  Even plain old CD-R disks were a very scarce novelty.

A different VCR and what looks like a very large external 3.5″ floppy drive next to a PC/AT clone running two monitors.  One of them looks to be running Windows 286 and the other has a …DOS 3.0 installer?

Two monitors was a pretty rare thing in 1991 and I don’t think you could make it work like this.  Typically you needed one MGA/Hercules monitor and one CGA/EGA/VGA.

Another two monitor setup, another instance of that questionable PC tower, a minitower on its side and another AT keyboard.

Finally a good look at the back of that monstrosity from earlier.  We can tell that it was modeled after the //e because it has a joystick port next to the cassette and video ports.

Also the monitor isn’t plugged into the video port at all, but we’ll forgive them.

This fairly generic monitor shows up a lot as well.  I was absolutely CERTAIN that this was an Amiga monitor, but I cannot match it to any monitor ever sold by Commodore.  I’m going to call it the not-Amiga-Monitor from here on out.

Another oops on the part of the graphics team.  These mice have green connectors.  That would make perfect sense… if this was set in 1997 or later.  There was no color code for PS/2 connectors prior to then.

One of the frankenpcs next to a PC/XT clone, featuring a couple of PC/XT keyboards, a couple of caddy CD-ROM drives, some mice – wired, this time, not wireless – and a pair of Apple Disk ][ drives.  Interesting that the Apple disk drives are the older pre-//e style.

 

Getting away from nitpicking PCs for a moment, strong shout-out to the Motorola MicroTAC.  I thought this was another blunder but apparently it dates all the way back to 1989.

A couple of those not-Amiga monitors make an appearance in a biological weapons lab.

Another desk littered with 3.5″ disks, though this time there is an external 3.5″ drive to read them.  The motherboard on the right makes a few appearances.  I’m not sure what it’s based on.  It has one big chip that I suspect is a 68000-series processor but beyond that I’m at a loss.

Nice view of the open minitower.  Note the IDE and floppy cables.  Also the CD player from earlier makes an appearance, but this time in a “door closed” version.

I really feel this case design is maybe a touch modern for 1991 but not so much to make a stink about it.

Nothing weird about these oscilloscopes, other than that they are labeled in Russian and you find them in an American facility.  I suspect that this is just a case of “nobody is going to stop for long enough to read the labels on these and we need some science stuff for a set dressing”.

OK, another example where I’m just in love with the detail.  The power supply in the PC here has a pass through for a monitor.  Very chunky 80s tech that stopped being a thing pretty early on.

Just a zoom in on the front panel of the frankenpc to show the status lights and keyboard lock.   I think I owned a PC with this exact front panel.

Not sure what this is based on, but it’s an interesting portable computer… or more likely, a portable terminal.  Doesn’t show up often and only in places where you would expect to find older tech.

Speaking of terminals, this adorable portrait-style terminal makes several notable appearances in one level.  It has both amber and full-color variants which I suspect is a bit of artistic license.

Back side of said terminal.  While it IS connected to power, the serial port is consipciously not hooked up to anything.  Eh.  Good enough.

Cart full of computers, showing both the “open” and “closed” versions of that suspiciously-modern PC tower.

Hey, it’s Norton Commander!  This is absolutely appropriate for 1991.  Also the PCjr makes a very rare appearance here, though…

…somehow it’s a version of the PCjr that has a 3.5″ disk drive.  Pretty sure that never existed.

Nothing really to say about these little pod things other than that I love the color scheme.

Another huge win for the art team.  These power sockets are in Europe, and are completely different from…

…the power sockets in this American building.  I have a bad habit of looking at power sockets in video games, and I feel like they deserve extra credit for catering to this extremely specific fetish.

If only it weren’t for the purple connector on this keyboard cable.  C’mon, guys.

I like that this security terminal is a mash up of the Monitor ][ model that gets used everywhere in the game and the very generic PC/AT keyboard model.  Also the monitor is appropriately a green screen.  I think this may be the only time we see it with an image on it?

Very chunky Soviet …computer? terminal?  I dig the look.  These also only show up a few times in the game, and always where you would expect the tech to be outdated.

I really like that this little TV says “Multi System” on it, implying that it can display either PAL or NTSC signals.

A very similar shot to an earlier one,  the monitors in your home base change what’s displayed throughout the course of the game, which is awesome.  Both of these seem to have Windows/286, I think.  I originally thought it might be GEM but that would be a very deep cut.

A PC/XT with an AT-style keyboard, IBM PC monitor, wireless mouse, and … a Disk ][.   Also nothing on this desk can read any of those 3.5″ floppies.

And finally, a not-quite-a-computer piece of tech. This looks to be a word processor, basically a stand-alone device that just, well, lets you type up documents, save them to the included disk drive and print them out.  Could be modeled on a system from Brother, or Magnavox, maybe Epson?  I don’t know much about these.

This doesn’t have the keyboard.  It shows up a few times and never has a keyboard attached, which doesn’t make a lot of logical sense from a functionality standpoint… but if you wanted to use it as a piece of set dressing, maybe it works better this way than if you included the keyboard.

Anyway.  As I alluded to earlier, I really liked the campaign.   It didn’t have QUITE the crazy over-the-top set pieces that you get in some CoD games, but I found myself quite fond of the little band of misfits that you control over the course of it and the occasional lapses into absolute crazy town.

Also, there is absolutely no point in this game where you are in the gunner’s seat of a C-130 providing fire support.  I’m not sure if that’s been a thing in any BLOPS games, actually, but I know it must have been a temptation to slip one in and I would just like to give a big virtual hug to whatever product manager decided that it wasn’t necessary.

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox Series X | Leave a comment

Hitherto unseen levels of procrastination

Posted on September 6, 2024 by baudattitude

If you dig a few years back in the post archives, you’ll come across a post where I describe completing the Assassin’s Creed II platinum trophy something like seven years after finishing the game.

This was done with a mixture of shame – for taking so long to do it, when it’s one of my favorite games of all time – and pride, for gritting my teeth and relearning how to play an older AC game when they hadn’t quite gotten the formula figured out yet.

Today’s achievement is far heavier on the shame part.  There may be some pride?  Let’s talk about Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters, a PS3 movie tie-in game whose only real redeeming value is that it’s better than the film that inspired it.

The basic “completed the game” trophy is sitting at a pretty healthy 31.7%, so it looks like about one in four people who played this thing felt like grinding out the platinum.  That’s a pretty healthy ratio, probably helped out quite a bit because it’s not a particularly difficult game to 100%.  You need to finish it on hard mode and do some collectible gathering, but the majority of the trophies just come through the course of playing the game… assuming you switch up the powers you use occasionally, of course, since there are an awful lot of bronze trophies similar to “kill 10 mooks with the baseball bat”.

The only one that might be a hassle, all things considered, is the requirement to play at least one level of the game in co-op.  I actually did this in 2021 because I was about to sell my older PS3 and was not going to have a second controller after doing this.

So technically it’s only been three years since I played this.  But if we set that one aside, well…

I finished the game originally on March 31, 2012.   I then booted it briefly in November of 2021 to get the aforementioned co-op trophy.  Yesterday and today, I ground my way through the “Emerald Knight” difficulty, followed a guide to get the last handful of collectibles, and got a shiny virtual cup for my trouble.

So.  12 years.  5 months.  Seven days.  I don’t think I’ll be breaking this record any time soon.

Side note, it’s wild booting up my PS3 and seeing all of the games that I must have bought on deep sales and never actually played.  I’m going to assume, for my own sanity, that the majority of them were PS+ redemptions.

 

Posted in ps3, videogames | Leave a comment