Displaying the Undisplayable

Posted on March 22, 2024 by baudattitude

OK, “undisplayable” may be a little harsh.  But I don’t think it’s an entirely unfounded statement that your average fanboy is going to wind up with a ton of cool THINGS that they want to have on display but that are a little annoying to actually display.  Stuff like keychains, can badges, strap hangers, that kind of thing.

Like this stuff

There are always options, of course.  I’ve definitely had my share of small hanging things thumbtacked to the wall, and mounting a bunch of can badges to a square of felt and then sticking that up somewhere would work as well.

But either of those options has always struck me as a little tacky.

Pun not actually intended but I caught in on like my third proofreading pass of this and I was too proud of it to take it out.

One thing I found in Japan that I thought was going to be at least a partial answer were these little acrylic stands:

They were cheap, came in a couple of different shapes and you got like half a dozen per package.  They seemed perfect!

Well, no.

It turned out that they had very strict limits on what you could put in them, and because the notches were so small they were really limited.

Serval-chan fits!

I managed to make them work for a couple of things, and they were cute enough, but I think most of these are going to go forever unused.

So that didn’t go well.

On the other hand, I was watching a YouTube video where a devoted Genshin fan was showing off their desk,  and these things jumped out at me:

No, not the Barbara can badges and acrylic stands, though I would very much like those as well.  THE FRAMES.

Even better, the YouTuber in question carefully went over all of the stuff on her desk and explained that these frames were from a company called Ouxee.  Maybe OUXEE?  I’m not sure how it should be stylized.  Let’s go with Ouxee for now.

A quick google search later revealed that Ouxee has a catalog made up of all kinds of shelves and storage solutions for very weird spaces.  Stuff like an under-sink shelving unit that you fit in around the drainpipe:

Super handy, no?

And also and more importantly, a lot of assorted stands and tiny shelves for displaying nerd goods.

The ones I had fallen immediately in love with were these things:

Amazon listing

Naturally, they do not sell their products outside of Japan because we’re not worthy, or something, BUT they were happy to charge a small* fee for international shipping and it did not take long before I had 10 of these rectangular frame things and 4 larger square ones.

It turned out that they work very well!  They’re basically a plastic frame with two sheets of slightly stretchy, slightly sticky clear plastic that you can open up, stick things in, and close – and whatever you put in stays put, at least so far.

Keychains

Can Badges

Straps and a small acrylic stand

I have no idea how good these things will be long-term.  Plastic always has a tendency to yellow, after all.  Also, I’m not sure how reusable they are since the act of putting anything into them and closing them will stretch the plastic slightly.  My wife found an example online of using a hair dryer on low heat to “reset” them, so it’s possible they’re made out of a thermoplastic similar to heat shrink tubing?

But, for now they’re pretty cool.  My terrible photography skills aside, they do a great job of “floating” your small items in a way that lets you show them off and they come in either black or white to match your space’s vibe.

And, yes, I need to remove the “Remove Tag” tag from my lamp.  The problem is that once you do that the lamp can never be moved again as the bottom of it is covered in a very strong adhesive.

 

 

* The international shipping fee wasn’t actually that small.

10-days-later update:  While I was searching for something else entirely on Amazon, I found that these things ARE available in the US.  They seem to be mostly sold as displays for coin collectors, which makes sense.  Here’s one listing.

 

Posted in anime, organization | Leave a comment

Three years later, I’ve finished Blue Archive

Posted on March 19, 2024 by baudattitude

So I should start with a flashback to March of 2021, when everyone in my home state was still dealing with pandemic lockdowns.  We had some of the more severe restrictions in the nation, and everyone was pretty much dealing with it in their own ways.

My method of choice was watching a whole lot of videos of people walking around Japan on YouTube, since going to Japan is one of my favorite things to do and it was completely impossible at the time.

Anyway.  In one of these videos, I saw a video billboard advertising a mobile game that promised a combination of cute girls + kemomomimi + guns, and I quite naturally went immediately to google to look it up.  This was, if timestamps can be believed, on March 28th.

Sadly, I immediately found out that it was a Japan-only game.  Well, it was written by a Korean team so I’m certain it was also available in Korea, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Eventually it got an English release, on November 8th of the same year.  I downloaded it day one, eager to find out whether it was as cool as the brief glimpse of a trailer playing on an Akihabara billboard had made it seem.

And, I’ll be quite honest, I did not like it.  There were, yes, cute girls with guns and some sort of weird thing going on where they all attended different schools in a city made up entirely of schools and administered by a student council government and who also regularly engage in shooting each other a lot because they all have possibly-mystical halos that prevented them sustaining any real injury.  You’re assigned to this city as sort of a combination teacher/troubleshooter thing.

Your character is not a cute girl with a gun (it’s unclear what your sex is, and your strongest weapon is a tablet computer) and does not have one of these possibly-mystical halo things so you are infinitely more delicate and vulnerable than any of the students you are teaching, but that wasn’t really a turn off.  I mean, it’s not exactly rare to see someone’s highly specific fetish turned into a video game.

The gameplay, however, did not exactly excite me.  While you set up teams of six characters to clear missions, you don’t really have any sort of direct control over any of your team members.  Gameplay boils down to watching them run from left to right through some admittedly very charming levels, automatically shooting and taking cover as they go.  You do get to control when they use special attacks, which adds some strategy to it, and I understand that high level Blue Archive play involves a LOT of micromanagement of this, but it did not hook me.

Screenshot

It is cute though.

At the end of every level, you get a victory screen featuring your chosen characters, though this again was kind of disappointing because I’m not a huge fan of super-deformed characters and there is a world of difference between the gorgeous cel art used in the story and the character models used in gameplay.

So I kinda mostly dropped it after the prologue.  I left it on my phone and tablet, and occasionally I would log into it and run through a couple of the game’s missions, but I never started the story campaign so I was very limited in the things I could do.  It was fun enough just to watch bars fill up, but not fun enough for me to go beyond that.

Then the pandemic ended, and Japan eventually opened up to tourism, and my wife and I spent a week touring cultural sites and a week binge shopping in anime shops.

And, yeah, there was a fair bit of Blue Archive merch even though I didn’t recognize most of the characters on display.  I did buy a mouse pad with a fox girl on it.

The mouse pad / desk mat in question.

So that could have been the end of it.  However.  Around about the time I came home from our trip, I was reading news about the impending December 2023 Comic Market and how it was organized by content, and I was moderately stunned to find that it had two entire display halls devoted exclusively to Blue Archive doujin merch.

Like, obviously this game was A Thing and I probably should be taking a second look at it.

So, early November I booted it back up and started trying to figure out how to get further into it.

One of the first things I discovered when looking up resources was that there was an infamous wall, roughly halfway through the main story, where people tended to get hard stuck for days or weeks at a time while they leveled up characters so they could get past the mission.

This didn’t sound fun, and I definitely didn’t want to be getting into a story and then hit something like this, so I looked up the level requirements for the mission.  It’s a mission with a recommended level of 57, and people report that you can get past it as low as level 40 if you have the right characters and the right strategy, but I am a somewhat brute-force type of guy and decided I would just level up to 60 before even starting the story.  This is possible because going through the tutorial missions when you first start the game opens up a few ways to spend energy, and spending energy converts directly to experience points.

So I did that for three months, and finally started the main story, at level 61, on February 17th.

As a side note, one interesting thing that Blue Archive does is that it gives up a way to sort of save up for characters by running hard mode missions.  So, even if the gacha system is being stingy with your waifu of choice you can eventually just buy her outright.

It took me until February 3rd, but I eventually added the same wolf girl who had gotten me to fall down this particular rabbit hole back in 2021 to my roster.

Anyway.  I found some guides on reddit saying, without a hint of guile, that you could easily finish the entire story at level 50 so I figured that being level 60 meant I could just coast through the whole thing and skip the grind.  Thankfully I did not actually stop grinding.  More on that in a bit.

Tonight – March 19th, so that’s a month after starting – I finished the main story.

I’m not sure I can possibly describe the proper insanity I’ve been put through in the last month, but I am certain that it was worth it.  Yes, even though for like three months I was loading a game for 5-10 minutes every day only to burn energy and turn it into XP without really ever playing it.  It was Just That Good.

In the fine tradition of JRPGs, you start off doing menial tasks for your grandfather’s farm and then eventually kill God, though in this case the “menial tasks” involve trying to help the last students of a bankrupt academy avoid eviction or helping a school club avoid being disbanded and the “killing God” is, well, actually it’s not entirely far off from that.

Like 95% of this involves reading and staring at mostly static images with a very minimal bit of animation to them.  Occasionally you actually do some of the run left-to-right sort of combat missions but the vast majority of the game is a literacy check.

They are, however, very PRETTY static images.  Like, both the art and music in this are way too good for the price of admission.

You get your crazy assassin maids.

You get your tiny girls casually carrying ship-mounted railguns

You get your cute girls driving very fast away from explosions

…and your poster child for I Can Fix Her.  No. No, you can’t. She’s Best Girl tho.

And this screenshot which I am including for reasons that I hope are obvious.

Basically you spent like 40 or 50 hours getting to know a huge cast of characters at different schools, and then the Final Story is another 10-hour long story where everyone you’ve met comes together to solve an earth-shattering crisis and, well, kill God.

OK technically you do not kill God.  You’ll just have to play it to find out.  And I profoundly recommend playing this game, even if you don’t basically grind for three months before you even start.  I would in fact really recommend NOT grinding for three months before you even start because that would be insane.

HOWEVER.

Let’s talk about walls and why they are so obnoxious in this game.

I quickly discovered that the reason for the infamous midpoint wall is that it’s the first time that the story mode of the game asks you to use your own characters, rather than giving you a set of pre-assigned characters who are tuned to perfectly clear the mission and move on.

Through the first four main story volumes, you have to do this twice, and there’s a bit of a repeated fourth-wall-breaking gag where the Bad Guy asks you how you’re going to defeat him and you do this:

OK about that.  While I did eventually throw some money at the gacha system, I didn’t wind up using the character from it in any of the story missions.  So I will state, very firmly, that you are 100% able to clear the game’s main story without dropping a penny on it.  This is not typical for gacha games, but this one is exceptional in that regard.

If you’re curious, it’s because I wanted the fox girl from the mousepad I bought in Japan and she was on a limited time banner.  I spent less than what a regular game release would have cost in the process so I consider it a donation to the publisher for making a very enjoyable story.

So if we’re talking about only the first four volumes of the story, there are only a couple of walls and they aren’t too high.

And then there’s the fifth volume, or the “Final Story” volume.  I suspect most of the guides I was seeing on Reddit, promising that I could coast through the game at level 50, were written before this volume was released, because there is a single story chapter in this that is basically wall after wall after wall.

I was level 68 when I hit this, with a lot of leveled characters, and was humming happily along until I started hitting levels that knocked the hum right off my face.

One of the drawbacks of my approach to grinding is that I had gotten tons of levels… but very little actual gear for my characters, since I’d just been replaying intro missions over and over again and not playing higher level missions that dropped better equipment.  So I had highly-leveled very flimsy characters.

Fortunately, the game has a system that lets you borrow characters from other players, and that’s the thing that got me through the chapter.

Screenshot

Level 87 kitted-out and fully-skilled 5-star character for 40,000 credits, when I have 40 million on hand?  YES PLEASE.

I have a couple other minor quibbles with the last chapter, like the part where you have to fight five bosses in a row… and them fight them AGAIN for story reasons, but there were too many absolutely glorious moments for me to have more than minor quibbles.

Like, you know the bit in every good action movie featuring a team of heroes where the Good Guys are on the ropes and the Bad Guys are leering in anticipation of victory and then someone off-camera says something sarcastic or super understated and it’s like ohhhhh buddy we are ON NOW?  The last volume in particular is just that, over and over again, with all the minor characters you last saw ages ago and have lost track of.

It’s a simple and horribly overused trope and I am right here for it every time.

So to sum up.

Tiny girls with railguns:  1

Combat maids: 5

Homeless tactical bunny girls: 4

Writing: 10/10

Gameplay: 3/10

Art: 10/10

Music: 10/10

F2P friendliness: 10/10

OVERALL RATING: 12/10 just download it already.  There’s sadly no PC client or console version, but there are Android/iOS/iPadOS versions.  I’d recommend hooking up an external monitor or mirroring your phone to your TV, because the art deserves to be seen on a big display.

And, finally, thank God I am not in Japan and I do not have ready access to merch or I would be considerably poorer at this precise point in my life.

Posted in iOS, videogames | Leave a comment

17 Years Blog

Posted on March 3, 2024 by baudattitude

So there’s at least three things to remember March 3rd for.  The Nintendo Switch launched on March 3, and it’s also Macross Best Girl Misa Hayase’s birthday.

It’s also when I decided that the internet NEEDED to be subjected to my periodic rambling about… well, it started out with some school and general life related kind of posts but it has mostly become me ranting about video games.

Back then, I was a 30-something late returner to college, what they euphemistically called an “alternative student” with plans to go to school, get a degree in Japanese and get into translation work for cool stuff.

I did complete the degree.  I never got into the translation work.  At some point I started getting older.

Eventually I got old enough that I really want to show off some new bins and acrylic drawers I bought to whip my office closet into shape.  So I’ll do that and then keep rambling after the picture.

I mean, it’s only a matter of time before this goes to madness again but for now it looks so dang organized.

I’ve been posting far less about video games because I’m sucked into no less than FOUR live service style games and honestly it’s hard for me to get back to the days when I would play a game for 3 or 4 days and feel a sense of satisfaction at the end credits.  My most recent one is Blue Archive, and there will probably be a post devoted to that soon, but I’m also playing NIKKE, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft.

Pro tip: For the love of God, don’t do this to yourself.

Anyway, while I never got that job translating cool Japanese stuff into English, I’ve been doing well enough at the career I sorta accidentally landed on that I get to take the occasional trip to Japan and my wife and I are considering spending some time there once they open up their Digital Nomad visa.  The benefit of my current job being 100% work-from-home is that this is a real possibility, though of course it would involve being “at work” from 2 AM until 11 AM Japan time which could be a bit of a problem when it comes to having a reasonable work / life schedule.

If that goes well, we may even try to live there for a full year at some point.  After our last trip it became very obvious that it’s a nation that may have some problems but also has its act seriously together.  Like, we have been hooked on watching “tiny apartment” videos – not that we want to LIVE in a tiny apartment, mind you – and it still befuddles us that you can live in Tokyo and spend like 300 bucks a month in rent, though admittedly you are living in basically a shoebox with a front door at that point.

But setting that aside for the moment.

In the last 17 years I have graduated, moved twice, shared our home with as many as five cats at one time, lost a ton of weight twice, gained it mostly back twice, held five jobs, gotten a motorcycle license, had one motorcycle accident involving falling over at roughly 5 mph while trying to make a turn that I should not have tried to make, visited Japan multiple times and China / France / Brussels / the UK once each, and generally had a pretty good time of things.

Oh, and my wife has put up with my nonsense the entire time which is more than I could possibly deserve.

At some point the following sort of statement is going to become increasingly less likely but for now I’m still on the right side of average lifespans to pull it off:

It’s been an interesting 17 years.  Here’s to 17 more years.

 

Posted in Japan, organization | Leave a comment

Looks like we’re getting some more withered technology?

Posted on February 20, 2024 by baudattitude

The internet went a little nuts today because apparently the Switch successor has been pushed back to 2025.  I doubt I’ll be anywhere near to done with my backlog by then, so it seems fine to me.

Honestly, the system keeps selling, and more importantly keeps selling copies of Mario Kart 8, so I’m not surprised Nintendo is riding this gravy train for as long as possible.  If I were a multinational video game company and had the option of writing a game in 2014 and then selling it at full price for eleven years, I would 100% do that.

But I am not a multinational video game company, so I guess I will keep punching a clock every day to make money that can be given to aforementioned companies.

Like Shift Up, whose Stellar Blade I have already preordered based almost entirely on the fun I have had with their mobile title, “Nikke: Goddess of Victory”.

I don’t know much about Stellar Blade except that it’s a post-apocalyptic 3rd-person action melee combat game with 150% of your daily recommended serving of butts, which is completely different from their post-apocalyptic gacha cover shooter with 150% of your daily recommended serving of butts.

Speaking of which, I crossed a major milestone in Nikke today, finally beating chapter 20.   This is a notoriously difficult chapter, but I got through it with One Simple Trick.  Grinding!

My squad, bravely running away from fiery annihilation

The last few story chapters had some pretty steep increases in team power requirements mid-chapter, so my policy starting with chapter 19 has been to grind up until my team is at least 20k power over the recommended for the first fight in the chapter, then do everything at once.  It’s worked out so far.

There was a ramp up in difficulty over the course of the chapter, but I still made it to  20-31 comfortably in the blue when it comes to recommended power, and not having to fight with a power deficit meant that my team made short work of the boss.

Speaking of, the boss is a pretty bitchin’ two-headed dragon, though in true oh-Korea-what-will-we-do-with-you fashion she’s a two-headed dragon who is also a super hot conventionally attractive woman.

Also she loses a head when she’s not a dragon?  That must be very confusing.

Maybe she’s just piloting the dragon, which honestly makes more sense.

Apparently once you beat the fight you can unlock the boss as a playable character through the game’s Liberation system, but I’m mid-unlock on Guilty so it will be a while before I can do that.

I’m somewhat surprised you get her for free through Liberation, instead of being yet another limited gacha unit designed to suck your wallet dry.  I’m not going to say that Shift Up is any sort of saint in that regard – they certainly aren’t! – but they could certainly have been greedier here.

Speaking of units designed to suck your wallet dry, however…

One of the nice things about doing all of chapter 20 in one sitting, as well as quite a bit of chapter 5 hard mode, is that I managed to scrape together enough gems for Just One More 10-pull and Maid Privaty finally came home.  I did not have many gems saved up before this event started and I was being very firm on not spending any money so this was a happy surprise.

Yes, technically she’s not a limited unit and will be available via the regular recruit system starting next patch… but trying to target any specific character or alternate version of a character in that is madness.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

In which, I pick up a new hobby and collect clutter.

Posted on February 17, 2024 by baudattitude

Ever since our local Round 1 arcade opened, shuttered almost immediately for two years thanks to Corona-tan, and reopened, I have been a frequent visitor.  Mostly, I play rhythm games.  Sometimes, I bowl!

Sometimes, I drag along my wife or some friends, and that’s where this all started.

See, one of my college friends is a bit of a crane game nerd.  She spends a lot of time watching YouTube crane game videos and our trips to Round 1 usually end up with her husband carrying around a massive armload of plushies.  Apparently she has a sort of large net suspended from their bedroom ceiling where all of them wind up, but I haven’t seen this to confirm it.  I can only imagine that it’s a sort of very cuddly Sword of Damocles thing.

Anyway, the last time we got together was to celebrate me getting slightly older, so she  won a stuffed cat for me from a crane game as a birthday gift.  It has a high place of honor in my office, because you’re never too old to appreciate a plushie I guess.

That’s where it could have ended.  But, there was a game full of these little green octopus things that she fell in love with and that eluded even her practiced skills and I threw some credits into it as well, hoping to return the favor.

I did not do well.

Nonetheless, it actually made me start looking at the crane games instead of walking past them on the way to the rhythm games section.  And one day, they had a little chibi-style Yor figurine in one of the machines, and it was a mix of adorable and badass that made me actually decide to sink some money in.

Nobody was more surprised than I was when it eventually dropped into the chute.  I didn’t even have to spend that much money on the effort!

A couple of weeks later, I noticed that they had added crane games with Anya and Loid.

These did not come as easily.  I wound up spending nearly fifty dollars completing the family.

Since then, though, it’s become something of a weekend ritual.  Go to Round 1, play some rhythm games, walk down the crane game aisle on the way out, throw a few credits at anything that looks cute and is on top of the pile of prizes in a way that looks doable.

Cinnamoroll dropped into the slot after only two attempts!  My wife covets him.  He is on a shelf out of her reach.

I finally got the damn green octopus thing that eluded us for so many attempts.  This will be gifted to my friend who started the whole thing, to add to her net of plushies.  Maybe it be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and deluges them in soft bouncy mayhem.

I’m not actually well versed on  Sanrio lore.  Naturally I own a few small items emblazoned with their most famous cat, and  I understand that Kuromi is some sort of evil version of one of their other characters.  This also landed in the chute after only one attempt so obviously it was meant to be.

The most recent additions are this sleeping shark plush and a cat wearing a Round 1 cheerleader costume.  The shark really isn’t my sort of thing but it was perched on top of the prize pile in a way that suggested it would come home with virtually no effort, and this turned out to be the case.

At first I thought it was a surprisingly dark sort of toy because I was under the impression that sharks can’t sleep and that they die if they stop moving, but apparently some sharks can and do sleep, for at least a few minutes at a time.

The cat took rather more effort but it was cute.  My wife has claimed it for the moment, but we’re both pretty sure that our actual cat will likely steal it and drag it off to be clawed into submission.  He has a history of doing this to small stuffed toys.

Not pictured here, of course, are the MANY assorted prizes that refused to come out of their machines, some of which I spent depressing amounts of money on.  I need to get a little better about recognizing when something is just not meant to be!

Also, this is a bit of a dumb hobby to pick up when I am actually trying to reduce the amount of assorted junk in my life.  Most of these are destined to wind up in a donation box at the local thrift store at some point, and with any luck they will go on to put a smile on someone else’s face.

Until then, I am enjoying having a shelf of trophies that gradually grows larger.

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Finally, a trophy waifu.

Posted on February 12, 2024 by baudattitude

Despite being a big dang gamer nerd, I don’t have many platinum trophies.  Most of them are rhythm games or Soulslikes, and while either of those represents a certain amount of dedication they cannot compare to the time it took to collect the same for Genshin Impact.

Well, to be fair I wasn’t really trying to get this until about three weeks ago.  Up to that point I had just been doing something they call “playing the game normally” until I noticed that I was like 80% of the way to collecting the platinum trophy through just that and surely it couldn’t be too hard to go the rest of the way?

I make a lot of poor decisions that start with “surely, it couldn’t be too hard to…” and honestly this wasn’t the most flagrant example of that.  The most time-consuming part was  tracking down about 300 more chests in the Liyue region.  I did need to stop grinding reputation in Fontaine and move my weekly quests back to the older countries, and collect some doohickies in Dragonspine since I’d never finished that part of the map, but that was a case of like an hour every week doing stuff I couldn’t do again until the next week.

I also had to grind down to floor 12 of the Spiral Abyss, which I had never done before, and finished it in a genuine nail-biter of a close fight with my wife cheering me on.

The lesson learned there was to not go up against a flying opponent when you don’t have anyone with a bow.  Like 80% of the fight the only damage I was putting out were Yae Miko’s electric turrets, which were able to target on the Z axis and tickle the dude to death.

So, really, it could have been a lot worse.

Genshin is a weird game to talk about, though.  On one hand it is a game with a lot of subtle toeing-of-the-line when it comes to China and how it is the most awesome place in the world and doesn’t every other country just get us completely wrong, and incorporates some incredibly predatory FOMO when it comes to promoting new characters and weapons via gambling, and is painfully stingy when it comes to handing out primogems to the unwashed f2p masses…

But on the other hand it is a ridiculously huge, gorgeous world that is FULL of stuff to do and places to explore and has a story that is 100% playable from beginning to (so far) end with easy-to-acquire four star characters.  Like, you could take the half-dozen or so characters that you are guaranteed by getting through the tutorial and never roll on the gacha again if you wanted, and honestly I am occasionally tempted to try that and see how it goes.

Furthermore, unlike a lot of episodic games, I’m pretty confident that it is going to make it to the end.  It’s been out for over three years and has 5 out of 7 regions complete while still printing money for the creators every single day.  Pretty much every patch comes with enough new “game” to be equivalent to a complete single-player packaged game, and those hit every couple of months.

It’s also raised the bar for what’s possible in a mobile game.  Granted, I don’t typically play it on my phone, but I am a well-off nerd with multiple large-screen devices that I can use instead.  For people for whom their phone is their games console, it’s the sort of massive open-world exploration game that you’d have written off as untenable only a few years ago.  Honestly, it’s hit me about as hard as the first time I saw Wolf3d running on a 386 back in the early 90s.  I would not have thought it possible on the hardware, yet here it is.

The only embarrassing thing I really need to come to terms with is that I’m supposed to be a raving weeaboo and yet the games I am regularly playing are Genshin Impact (China), World of Warcraft (USA), Nikke (South Korea), Blue Archive (South Korea, again) and Chrono Circle (yet more South Korea).  Like, I need to find a Japanese game to get hooked on at some point before I start practicing my hangul.

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The Day the Music (games) Died.

Posted on February 5, 2024 by baudattitude

If you scroll back a few months of posts – which isn’t that many posts, embarrassingly enough – you’ll come to a post of mine from September 2022 where I made fun of myself for completing the first Season Pass in Chrono Circle, since it was a bit of a grind to unlock cosmetics that would be completely useless as soon as the game went end-of-service.

Well, it’s been a little over two years and they are finally winding it down.  I am not claiming any particular power of prophecy here.  This is the normal cycle of life for any arcade rhythm game.

Surprisingly, it’s getting a full year of online service before moving to offline move in January of 2025, at which point you’ll still be able to play most of the game’s songs.  You just won’t be able to keep records or compete with other people for scores.

It is unclear at this time whether you will be able to set your note sounds so I may not be able to torture nearby people with the non-stop meowing of the kitty cat sound bank any more.

Basically, it’s a graceful sunsetting and I’m glad that I got to be there for the entire ride.  The local Round1 still has Wacca and Maimai machines, so I expect the Chrono Circle cab will stay on the floor for a while even after it moves to offline.  With any luck, I’ll find a new borderline-exercise game to play before that cab gets boxed up and sold to some collector under the table.

And then there’s Love Live: School Idol Festival 2, the sequel to and replacement for both Love Live: School Idol Festival and Love Live: All Stars.  That finally had its global launch announced just about a week ago, which would normally be a cause for rejoicing BUT…

In the same tweet, they announced that it would also be closing on May 31.  I can’t be certain that this has never been done before, but it’s certainly the first time I’ve ever known a game’s end of service before the servers are even online to play.

Despite that, I did download it when it launched, and spent a happy hour or so confirming that it was, yes, basically the same nine-button rhythm game that I spent years addicted to.  It’s a little shinier, maybe, but not hugely so.

Impressively, even with the expiration date well-known in advance, they are still happily selling you very expensive packs of premium currency that you could use to pull for trading card representations of your favorite Love Live characters.  That’s a level of chutzpah that gives me an excuse to use the word “chutzpah” and I gotta hand it to them for that.

I have to assume that somewhere there is a very strict contract that promised harsh penalties if the global version never launched and that this is the sole reason we’re getting it at all.

The replacement for LLSIF2 in Japan seems to be a sort of  “stalk your favorite idols” app where you do stuff like watch virtual live streams of your favorite virtual idols and read virtual social media posts and … honestly I’m not entirely sure of the appeal if you’re not super into parasocial relationships with anime girls.  There’s a game buried in it as well but it’s some sort of weird card thing rather than a rhythm game.

Anyway, I think the only Love Live game that will still be available outside of Japan is the PS4 game which I’ve never gotten into.  It is at least a proper rhythm game and now I guess I have a reason to check it out.  Calling it right now, they will find a way to kill it within three months of me doing do.

 

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Making life hard for a matchmaking algorithm.

Posted on December 18, 2023 by baudattitude

I have a bad habit of reading online forum threads and deciding to conduct experiments based on them, and that’s why I spent a lot of my Thanksgiving weekend playing random matches of Call of Duty multiplayer.

This is very out of character for me.  Normally I don’t dip into the multiplayer aspects of any particular CoD. I buy it to play through the campaign and marvel at the amount of detail they put into the various levels.

Like this guy.  He has a crappy office where the walls are basically more mold than wood and he’s rocking a CRT monitor from the mid 90s, but he has his comfort cereal.  You need to have little things like this to get you through the day.

After I finish the campaign, I watch what seem like hours of credits to get to the post-credits scene teasing the next title, then call it good.  Probably not the best use of sixty seventy bucks, but I have a good time.

That said, when I got sucked into the drama of a thread complaining about how strict the matchmaking was, I got curious enough that I decided I really needed to test it out myself.

While it’s something of a simplified view, there seem to be two camps when it comes to matchmaking. One camp thinks that it should try to give as close to a balanced match as possible, while the other camp wants to get matched more randomly, with the idea that matches that may be wildly unbalanced are more fun for both participants and spectators.

Here I will withhold the majority of my editorial comments, as they are not constructive. I will simply say that I fall into the first camp, and that the developers appear to agree with me, and leave it at that.

However, even knowing that my opinion was that the only possible correct one, I was left with questions.  Well, one question:

Just how good IS the multiplayer matchmaking in Call of Duty, anyway?

I mean, sure, I figure it’s pretty good at matching up people who have played a couple hundred games and who fit the game’s typical demographics… you know, young and perpetually buzzed on energy drinks… but how could it handle a 50-something guy with failing reflexes and no real experience?

To that end, I booted up my most recent purchase: Last year’s “Modern Warfare II”.

Please note that there is a Modern Warfare III now, and presumably most fans of the game have moved on to playing that one. Anyone still playing MWII has been playing it for a solid year and is likely to be quite good at the game.

I figured that would give the matchmaking algorithm even more of a hard time.

Anyway, after downloading a tiny “update”…

…I got into the actual game and started queuing for matches. My plan was to play about five games, take a break, come back and play five more on a different day and then tally the results.

I actually wound up playing 20 matches over three days, because it turned out to be generally fun and the multiplayer experience is absolutely packed with bars you fill up and that go DING and then give you more bars to fill up.

Like, I had a player level that was steadily increasing and unlocking things, and every gun I used had their own levels that were increasing and unlocking things, and there was some sort of battle pass thing that was always setting off fireworks whenever I passed milestones and “daily challenges” that gave me shiny gold badges that made my other bars fill up even more.

To answer the original question that started this whole madness: It turned out that the matchmaking is very good. Like, over those 20 matches I wound up on the winning side 9 times, with only one match where I felt like my team was absolutely outgunned from the start and only one match where the superstar on our team single-handedly carried us to victory.

These sorts of matches are very fun!

These are not:

(OK, to be 100% honest I did enjoy being on the winning side of the 6-to-1 blowout.  But it could not have been fun for the other guys.)

To put it lightly, I was shocked. I figured that the game might be able to ensure balanced win rates by just ensuring that every side had 5 experienced players and one abject newbie, but instead it managed to find games where I felt like I was actually kind of contributing to the overall outcome. I’m pretty confident that if I played a hundred matches it would somehow manage to get me to a 50/50 win/loss ratio and I’d probably enjoy it the entire time.

At one point I even had to stop and do some quick googling to make absolutely sure that MWII doesn’t fill up games with bots to make you feel better about yourself.

My second shock was finding out just how much I enjoyed the games. They did wear me out pretty quickly, and I couldn’t queue into match after match for too long without needing to take a break, but it did a good job of finding other people for me to play with and mixing up the game types, even if I wasn’t sure what the objective of a given game type was at times.

Usually they boiled down to “shoot anyone who isn’t on your side”, of course.

I feel I should give special note to the every-man-for-himself style of match, because it was the first time I realized how important audio was. Above and beyond basics like being able to hear footsteps and how the footstep sound would change if someone was, for example, running across a metal floor above you versus running on dirt, knowing that every time you fired a gun meant that everyone nearby suddenly had a clue to your location added a whole new level of spice to the game.

I’ll admit that a few of my deaths may have come from one of my bad habits in Call of Duty, which is stopping to take a second look at the scenery and make up little stories for myself based on it.

Like, these “no photographs” and “no eating” signs. Look at them. They’re not only slightly off level compared to each other, but the guy who put up the “no photographs” sign didn’t care enough to make sure it was straight.  This sort of disdain for the rules is WHY you have madmen with guns running through your office shooting each other.

Or this, where presumably the reason that nobody is in the office to get in the way of “friendly fire” is that it’s before noon on Sunday and they get the morning off which is nice.

If you’re like me and prone to this sort of inanity, I’ll mention that I happened to discover that you can create private matches to play against bots, then set the bots to be really really dumb, which is handy if you just want to learn the levels or just to run around and look at stuff.

Sadly, these private matches do not make the bars go ding. You still get XP numbers popping up on the screen when you shoot a bot, but they’re not actually added to your player XP or weapon XP. I guess it’s a good thing to prevent people abusing private matches to level up, but it’s like my one complaint.

Well, OK, the crazy patch size was my first complaint. So I guess that makes two complaints.

Wait, three. When someone shoots you, you get shown a kill cam of them shooting you and it comes with a little animated banner of their choice, and some of them seem to be intentionally provocative. Like, yes, you shot me in the head but does that need to come with an animated banner shouting “HE’S OUTTA HERE!” ?

So mmm overall score 8 freedoms out of 10. Would play again.

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The fading days of StreetPass

Posted on November 12, 2023 by baudattitude

One of my favorite features of the 3DS was “StreetPass”, which let your 3DS check in with any nearby 3DS systems and exchange a little greeting which included your Mii, what you’d been playing lately, and a little greeting.  Some games also used this to great effect – my favorite example being Dead or Alive Dimensions, which let you fight against CPU-controlled versions of other people.  I never met the other person who played DoA:D at one of my workplaces, but we had a daily rivalry going between my Kasumi and their Lei Fang.

I was also trying very hard to collect StreetPasses from all US states/territories and Japanese prefectures, but didn’t quite manage to get a full set.  I’m still missing six prefectures and nine states.

It wasn’t a feature that worked very well in the US.  People are spread out, we don’t take public transit much, and local multiplayer events just never seemed to happen much.  In Japan, on the other hand, people are jammed together and just taking a morning train or walking near a Pokémon Center would light up your green LED with a handful of passes.

Sadly, Nintendo did not bring StreetPass forward to the Switch, and corona broke my streak of travel to Japan.  So it’s been six years since I’ve been there and I didn’t have huge hopes for any connections, but I still brought my 3DS along.  It gave me an excuse to play Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, which is just an awkward name when I type it out like that.

For the TL;DR, I got 21 StreetPasses.  One of them was from a Floridian in the airport on the way to Japan, and the other 20 were from Japanese locals.  I was a bit surprised by this – the last time I was in Japan I got a ton of hits from other tourists.

Some of the greeting messages were from 3DS diehards.

3DS Forever!!

I’m going to keep using my 3DS!

Hopefully they enjoyed the reciprocal ping from my system.

Most of the other greetings were polite hellos.  Most people still rocking their 3DS seemed to be playing games like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Collection, which make sense for low key relaxing games.

I didn’t pick up any new prefectures for my collection, unfortunately.  Most of the ones I’m missing are pretty out of the way, so that’s not too much of a shock.

As for where I picked them up?  Well, our first week was spent going to tourist destinations in and around Kyoto.  Nara, Fushimi Inari, the Arashiyama Bamboo forest, Kinkakuji, that sort of place.  I picked up a grand total of 5 StreetPasses going to all of these places, including all of the time spent on transit.

Our second week was in Tokyo, where we mostly went to fanboy areas.  This was much more lucrative for StreetPass collecting.  I had 5 in a day of roaming Otome Road and the Ikebukuro Animate, 3 from a very short trip to Nakano Broadway, and 6 from spending an entire day shopping in Akihabara.  I also got one when we took a side trip to Yokohama to see the Gundam Factory, though I’m not sure if that was at the Gundam itself or somewhere in transit.

Of course, since the 3DS was released during the time when Nintendo went all-in on region locking, I didn’t actually buy any new software for the thing.  I did re-buy a couple of DS games I’d had at one time and sold.

Total cost for these two was Y1160, or a little under eight dollars US.

I bought entirely too many Switch games and a throughly geeky controller.  Probably put up a post about that at some point.

So that was fun, kind of a last hurrah for the feature.  It’s quite diminished from the days when I needed to buy the StreetPass plaza expansion that let me have 100 guests at a time at my Plaza Gate, but it was a good feeling to see the indicator light flash on occasionally.

 

 

 

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Quick thoughts on getting around Japan in 2023.

Posted on November 11, 2023 by baudattitude

Little bit of a brain dump today, based on notes I took while in Japan recently.  It’s become a much more convenient place to visit, as long as you’re like me and live every minute of your waking life tied to a smart phone.

First, getting around.

Google maps worked great for walking and transit directions.  I kind of wonder whether it’s put the “Navitime” guy out of a job.  I didn’t see any of their ads on the Yamanote line this trip, anyway.  I’ll miss that helmeted goofball.

Walking directions DID take me down some extremely narrow alleys at times, however.  In most countries I would be very wary of these directions, but it’s Japan.  The odds of getting mugged are …not zero, but very very close to zero.

I am, however, a big bald bearded dude and recognize that I have a somewhat privileged viewpoint.

When not walking, I am a massive fan of Japan’s transit systems and the way that you can typically use a combo of trains and busses to get to almost anywhere you would ever want to go.  Stations typically have excellent bilingual signage, though I’d strongly recommend being able to recognize the kanji for N/W/S/E (北/西/南/東) and Entrance/Exit (口/出).

Full disclosure: There was at least one occasion where I didn’t realize the bilingual signs had stopped until my wife pointed it out, though, so I may be a little biased here.

In addition, being able to add a Suica to Apple Wallet made paying for trains and busses extremely convenient, as long as your phone is always close to hand.  For those cursed with clothes without pockets, a physical Suica in a train pass case is likely going to be a much better idea.

However, if you’re on vacation or just worn out after a long day of exploring, getting a taxi may be a much better idea.  Apparently there are Japan-specific taxi hailing applications, but we did very well with Uber.  Unlike the US, Uber doesn’t call you a random guy in their personal car – instead, they hook into the taxi services so you get a licensed driver and you pay via the app.  It worked very well almost every time we used it, though there were two exceptions that I feel I should note:

First, it didn’t work at all in Numazu.  Unsurprisingly, it seems to be limited to bigger cities.

Second, trying to get a taxi after 10 PM may not be possible. My theory is that taxis after 10 PM in Japan tend to double their rates, and Uber doesn’t allow this.  I discovered this at a very bad time and had to walk a little over a mile at a very fast pace to barely catch the last train of the night back to Kyoto station.

My savior.

Even without the app, it wasn’t too hard to get a taxi at most hotels and train stations.  There’s usually a place to stand that is clearly marked as a taxi queue, and you can get in line for one.  It’s much better than my experiences in places where “who gets the taxi” is a matter of who wants it most.

On the topic of Suica, I strongly recommend using Suica pay almost anywhere you can, since you can top up the card on your phone and use it rather than winding up with pockets full of change.  I normally come back from Japan with a double handful of 1-and-5-yen coins, but this trip I spent with mostly light pockets and a minimum of jingling.  You can either say “Suica de” to the cashier, or just open the wallet app with the Suica card on display and show it to them.  They need to push a button on the register, after which you tap the phone to the reader, wait for two beeps and collect your purchases.

Apple Pay is a little less universal and it doesn’t seem like they’ve managed to make their brand an everyday word in Japan.  “Touch”, on the other hand, is recognized and usually “touch de” would get a look of recognition and a helpful point to the appropriate pad on the payment terminal to use.

As an aside, that’s “de” pronounced “day” and is a particle that you can use where you’d use “by” as in “touch de” = “pay by touch” or “taxi de” = “go by taxi”.  It’s a terribly useful tiny bit of Japanese.

DO, HOWEVER, CARRY CASH.  I had to come to the rescue of a table full of Australians at a very small cafe in Kyoto who had scrounged through everyone’s pockets and purses and still come up short for their bill.

While taxis and trains were great for the humans, we didn’t really want to manhandle our luggage around, so this was the first time I had taken advantage of luggage delivery services.  I fell thoroughly in love with them.  Basically there’s a counter at the airport where you take your bags, give them your hotel information and a reasonable amount of money, there’s a little paperwork,  and they then make your bags disappear and show up at the front desk of wherever you’re going.

The Hotel Granvia in Kyoto deserves an extra bit of recognition here because the staff asked where we would like our bags delivered on our departure as part of the check-in process.  When we were ready to head out to our next destination, we were very happy to find that all of the paperwork had already been done for us.

The only weird part, for me, was that they needed the full address of the hotel rather than the hotel name and city.  This actually made sending bags from Haneda airport TO the Hotel Granvia a little tricky, since their whole deal is basically “we’re in the train station in Kyoto” and it took a little googling to find a street address that the delivery service could get their system to accept.

The other thing that commonly gets recommended when traveling to Japan is a pocket Wifi router, and this is one place I’m going to diverge from the common wisdom.  We got one and it was extremely meh, getting poor reception and needing frequent charging.  It may just have been a bad unit.  T-mobile sells an 1-month international data package for fifty bucks and I had a better experience with that.

Something that is probably less advice for other people and more admitting that I’m a bit of an idiot, make use of tax free shopping where possible.  You’ll mostly see signs for this in touristy areas, advertising that you can buy things without the 10% consumption tax as long as you’re spending at least Y5000 and have a passport.

I’ve used these a couple of times on previous trips and the experience was miserable.  Lots of paperwork and at the time you had to go to a counter at the airport to actually get the money given to you as a refund on what you’d already spent.

This trip, I actually waved this off the first couple of times it was offered to me, which turned out to be a mistake. It’s much easier now and you get the tax removed right there at the register.  Most of the times they just scanned my passport, but one time they asked me to scan a QR code on my phone and go to a web site and click a button.

Also apparently the tax refund has been issued at the store itself for at least a decade, so this isn’t new at all.  My brain has been retaining some seriously ancient information that has probably cost me quite a bit in taxes that I didn’t technically need to pay.

Oh, and shipping stuff home was also easier.  I’ve done this plenty of times in the past and it’s always been a bit annoying to get the appropriate forms filled out.  This time, they just handed me a tablet and pushed the “English” button for me so I could fill out the address information, package contents, and values.  You’ll want to have a list of everything in the box before you go to the post office, however.

You can buy EMS boxes at the post office itself but you’ll want to go to a Y100 store for a roll of packing tape.

OK.  That’s all my random Japan travel tips in one post.  To sum it up: getting around Japan is just super convenient for foreigners now, and places where there used to be just a little bit of friction have been smoothed over by the advances of technology.

 

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