Baud Attitude

Time to put Tamriel down for a bit.

Posted on May 11, 2015 by baudattitude

I realize you don’t really “finish” an Elder Scrolls game, per se. Still, I completed both the Dragonborn and Dawnguard expansion storylines in the last few days, and it seems like a good place to take a break.

According to Steam, I’ve put 156 hours into Skyrim. That pales in comparison to some of the hours I’ve sunk into MMOs over the years, of course, but it’s the most time I’ve ever devoted to a single-player game.

It’s definitely going to spoil me for other RPGs for a while, which is good because it means that I’m not tempted to rush into The Witcher 2 in preparation for the launch of Wild Hunt. I’m going to stick to shorter games for a while. 🙂

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Random Chinese Junk Food

Posted on May 10, 2015 by baudattitude

I have a friend who is a big fan of Kinder Eggs. These are chocolate treats, sold everywhere in the world that is not the US, that consist of a hollow chocolate egg with a toy surprise inside. They are not sold in the US because our children are dumb and swallow toy surprises and choke on them.

So whenever I go abroad, I smuggle her back one or two.

To make things look better for customs, I always make sure to pack a bunch of other junk food. In theory, if I ever get pinched for smuggling illicit toy-filled candy, I can claim that I was just bringing back a bunch of snacks and had no idea that the Kinder Eggs were the diabolical child-murdering chocolates that they are.

It probably won’t work, but the side effect is that I always come home with weird foreign junk food.

Like these Oreos:

Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. They sell Oreos in China that are Blueberry/Raspberry flavored, Orange/Lemon flavored and Grape/Peach flavored. The package on the right is Lemon Oreo Thins, which have cookies about half the thickness of traditional Oreos.

Gentlemen, we have an Oreo Gap. Our Oreo technology cannot repel flavors of this magnitude.

Less worrying are some genericish chocolate bars:

Just white and milk chocolate, with crispy rice bits. We have these in this country. We are not at risk from these.

What DOES put us all at risk is this packaging for Lays Stax. In this country, they are an inoffensive Pringles knockoff. In China, so much more sinister:

It’s a can with a plastic tray in it. You can get the last chips out of the can without dumping crumbs all over yourself and the floor. THIS IS AMAZING and we are all DOOMED. The Chinese have won the junk food wars.

Posted in China, food, travel | Leave a comment

Happy Mother’s Day!

Posted on May 9, 2015 by baudattitude

OK, technically this is a day early. Consider it a reminder to call your mom.

PSA over, moving on:

A while back, incensed with the ending of the Da Capo anime, I bought the translated visual novel from MangaGamer, and that’s how I got on their mailing list.

They mostly sell Eroge and they are not in the least bit shy about this.

At any rate, all of this text has been a lead-in to the following bit of unintended hilarity:

I have the refined sense of humor of the average 7th grader, so this has had me giggling off and on for the last hour and a half.

I regret nothing.

Posted in eroge, random | Leave a comment

Crimson Dragon: Side Story

Posted on May 8, 2015 by baudattitude

I have a difficult time thinking of a group of gamers more easily abused than Sega Saturn fans. The system had a painfully early demise in the US and was by virtually every measure an abject failure, but the slightest hint of a sequel, real or “spiritual” to any of its many cult classics has us lining up for another chance to spend money at trying to recapture the old Sega magic.

Buying Crimson Dragon: Side Story didn’t involve too much money, but I was rather disconcerted when I launched the thing for the first time and it started talking about the jewels that I would need to acquire in order to unlock skills for my dragon or continue upon a defeat.

I confess that I thought unkind thoughts at this precise moment.

These jewels are, naturally, sold on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Or were. They’re priced in Microsoft Points rather than real money, so you can’t actually buy them now.

Fortunately, you can get jewels through finishing game levels – though at a miserly pace – or by simply moving from spot to spot. The game keeps track of every location you’ve played it in and awards jewels based on distance traveled.

Since I started the game for the first time as the high-speed train I was in pulled away from Beijing, destination Shanghai, I picked up quite a few of these jewels in very short order.

I needn’t have worried overmuch, as it turns out, because I didn’t actually wind up using any skills that cost gems to buy in the course of beating the Story mode. They seem blissfully optional, though you will need them for certain achievements.

While, for whatever reason, the game avoids using the Panzer Dragoon name, it’s very much a scaled-down version of the series, with all of the haunting music, desolate-yet-beautiful landscapes and subtly depressing story that you’d expect from one.

I will not apologize for using “scaled-down” to describe a game about a dragon.

So there’s also a game bit in there. This is also classic Panzer Dragoon, with appropriately huge bosses and lock-on targeting. There are some different weapon styles as well, and I was quite fond of a weapon that just has your dragon constantly shooting big yellow energy balls. It allowed me to see more of the screen than other weapons, which required me to use one thumb to move the dragon and another hand to target things you didn’t want to be in front of you anymore.

As you finish stages – win or lose – you gain experience for your dragon, which translates into stronger weapons, more health, etc. You can also drop back to earlier levels to grind a bit should you find yourself stymied by a particular boss, and I was very grateful for this when I got well-and-truly stymied by the stage four end boss.

Stage four turned out to be the penultimate stage. Stage FIVE is just a straight boss fight and I managed to one-shot it after all the grinding I did to clear stage four.

After clearing the five story mode levels, there are 25 missions, all of which just rehash the five levels you’ve already played in various orders and with tweaked difficulty levels. Normally I’d leave that bit of a game alone, but I was stuck on a train with not much to do, so I had a good time clearing out some of those missions.

It was a pretty good use of 99 cents, and if you have a Windows Phone I’d say go for it.

The only thing I’ll point out as an nonredeemable flaw is that, if you are an achievement completionist, this game will likely drive you to drink. One of the achievements requires beating the final boss 200 times, and even though it’s something you can do in 3 minutes or so, I can’t fathom spending 10 hours replaying the same level over and over just to pump up my gamerscore by another few points. Another two require you to have unlocked every unlockable skill, and some of those are gated behind having Xbox live friends who a) have a Windows phone to play the game on and b) are kind enough to play it and submit leaderboard scores. You also need jewels to unlock the skills, so you may be sunk here even if you DO have friends with the game.

If you’re comfortable with getting about half of the available 200 gamerscore, that’s something that I was able to knock out in four or five hours, so anyone who’s actually any good could likely do it a lot quicker.

Posted in videogames, Windows Phone | Leave a comment

Speak & Spell Not Included

Posted on May 7, 2015 by baudattitude

If I had to pick an unexpected benefit of visiting China rather than Japan, I’d have to say that it was a fairly inexpensive trip. When I visit Japan, I tend to do a LOT of shopping. I mostly stick to second-hand shops and used game stores, so I’m not spending a lot on any one thing, but it adds up pretty quickly.

I passed through a bunch of different shopping districts in China, but I never felt too inclined to do much shopping. Most of the brands on offer were western fashion brands, there were very few game stores and I only ever ran across one store that offered Japanese character goods, so I simply didn’t have the opportunity to go nuts. I’d converted $900 into Chinese yuan and, with only a few days left in the trip, still had the majority of it.

Of course I bought a gadget.

With the recent Fatal Frame V and Rodea announcements, I actually considered buying an American WiiU from an import shop and flying it back to the states, but I dismissed that as fundamentally silly.

Instead, I decided on a phone.

Specifically, I bought a Xiaomi Mi4, a phone that will never be sold anywhere near the US, because Apple no doubt has an army of lawyers just waiting for them to come within reach. The Xiaomi engineers took a good look at the iPhone 4 – still Apple’s best-looking phone, in my ever-so-humble opinion – and decided to hit Control-C/Control-V and take off early for the weekend.

OK, so they also hit the “resize to 120%” button halfway through the process.

I won’t go into the details – there’s an Ars Technica review for that, if you’re curious – but it is a big jump in hardware from the Nokia Lumia 920 that I’ve been packing for the last couple of years. The screen is bigger and pushes a lot more pixels, it’s got a quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM which makes it snappy as all get out, and it’s just generally a brute under the hood.

The drawback of importing a phone, of course, is that while this IS an LTE phone, it doesn’t support the LTE frequencies as we use in the US. I’m stuck with GSM frequencies and 2G data when I’m not near wi-fi, which is great for battery life but which means that I’m not going to be doing any mobile video streaming. It’s plenty fast enough for email, twitter, and wikipedia, and those represent the majority of my on-the-go data use, but heavy duty stuff is going to make me find an access point to get things done.

Ignoring the aesthetics, the reason that I went looking for this specific model of phone is that Microsoft has promised to release Windows Phone 10 for the thing, and I really want to get a Windows Phone that is not beholden to a specific carrier for updates. That should be coming in July or so, if we’re lucky.

In the meantime, I am experimenting with Android. This phone is designed for tinkerers, so it was very easy to replace the scary Chinese ROM with a global ROM that has Google services and presumably phones home to China far less often. There IS a vanilla AOSP port for the thing, but I elected to stick with Xiaomi’s MIUI V6, based on Android 4.4.4 “Kit-Kat”.

It’s been interesting coming from Windows Phone to Android. There’s obviously a ton more application support on Android, and even applications available for both platforms are better maintained on the more popular platform. I SHOULD be falling in love with Android, but I’m really not, and I think it’s a case of me butting heads with a basic design philosophy. Both Windows Phone and iOS feel like extensions of your PC (or Mac), and Android feels more like a conduit to servers and services on the web – it has an ephemeral nature about it that I’m not quite comfortable with.

To be fair, Google is at a disadvantage when it comes to desktops. The AppleID and Microsoft ID systems give a huge advantage when integrating into their respective ecosystems, and an Android-based phone is never going to log in to my iTunes account or let me add points to my Xbox Live Gamerscore. Google owns the web, so it makes sense to sell an OS that is tightly integrated with Google-provided web services.

I’ll give it a couple of months to grow on me, though, and see what I think once I’ve had some time to get used to the quirks.

Posted in China, gadgets, travel | Leave a comment

Kentucky Fried What Now?

Posted on May 6, 2015 by baudattitude

Of the big western fast food chains, I don’t think any have adapted quite as thoroughly to Asian tastes as Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Japan, the chain has even managed to make itself part of the local Christmas tradition and the Colonel regularly shows up in popular culture.

In China, I can’t say whether the chain has made that much of an impact, but the menu is decidedly tuned to local tastes, with fried shrimp on the menu and red bean pies and egg custard on the desserts list.

There’s just one problem – with the option of getting fried shrimp OR fried chicken, how is a man ever supposed to make a choice? I can see myself wasting my entire lunch hour staring at the menu board, desperately locked in one of the world’s greatest conundrums.

Thankfully, KFC heard my pain, and came up with something called the “伴鸡伴虾堡”, or (if Google Translate is to be believed) “Companion Chicken Companion Shrimp Fort”

This is dangerous alchemy indeed. Is man MEANT to eat such a thing?

I decided to find out.

Now, I am used to fast food items not exactly living up to the advertising images when actually ordered, so it was a bit shocking to order a Companion Chicken Companion Shrimp Fort Combination Meal and wind up with a tray that looked like this:

You’ll have to pardon the bad lighting. This is what happens when you don’t want to use the flash in a crowded restaurant.

The point is, when I got it out of the box, it looked rather tasty, not a disgusting mess.

And, yes, it was pretty good. They’re pitching the Companion Chicken Companion Shrimp Fort as part of their “New Oats Burger Series”, which suggests that they’ve put a lot of effort into the bun. It paid off – it was one of the better fast food burger buns I’ve had. There’s also lettuce, some sort of mustard-based dressing, and the promised separate shrimp and chicken patties.

The chicken patty was, well, a KFC chicken patty. I did not count the herbs and or spices, but I feel confident that all eleven were present.

The shrimp patty was, as expected, shrimp, but covered in one of the strangest breadings I’ve experienced. The fried shrimp in the side dish were a more or less traditional breading, but the patty was fried in something that resembled a breakfast cereal of some sort, with a most unusual texture.

This would be a tricky one for KFC to bring to the states, and I’m not sure we’re ready for Companion Chicken Companion Shrimp Fort. I wouldn’t mind if they added fried shrimp to the list of sides here, though.

Posted in China, food, travel | Leave a comment

Liberation Maiden

Posted on May 5, 2015 by baudattitude

I’m going to commit a bit of a cardinal sin in talking about Liberation Maiden, which is that I’m going to assume that you’ve played either Panzer Dragoon or Rez or preferably both.

If you haven’t, go get on that now.

If you have, and you have liked them, you would likely enjoy Liberation Maiden as well, because it copies the core mechanic of those games – hold a button and drag a targeting reticule around the screen to highlight stuff you are displeased with, release the button to unleash Macross-level missile spam, repeat.

Honestly, for a Suda51 game, it’s surprisingly, um, normal. The plot is a little wacky – you play the teenage President of New Japan, tasked with flying into battle to save her country from alien invaders – but there are none of the truly bizarre moments I’ve come to expect from anything with a Grasshopper logo.

It’s a satisfying few levels of flying around and blowing stuff up, with some fantastic boss fights. It’s hindered a bit by being on a tiny screen – some of these visuals really deserve a better presentation, and it IS super short, but for 8 bucks on the eShop, I don’t see how you can go wrong.

I played it on the 3DS but it’s also been released for iOS. I will have to try it on the iPad to see the improved visuals and to see if the touch controls are better suited for it – the 3DS controls have you manipulating the left thumbstick and using the stylus AND using the shoulder buttons all at the same time and I wound up with a fantastic pain in my left wrist for most of the next day after playing for an hour.

Posted in 3DS, videogames | Leave a comment

Code of Princess

Posted on May 4, 2015 by baudattitude

I’ve had a 3DS for a few months now, and it’s seen frighteningly little use playing actual 3DS software. It does make a fabulous regular DS – but, since I already had one of those, that’s scarce justification to have bought the new system.

It’s not my fault that the Vita is my portable system of choice – it’s a fantastic piece of kit and is positively flooded with games that fit into my wheelhouse, as it were, and the 3DS has an unfortunate lack of non-first-party titles to earn it a place in my go bag.

So, knowing that I’d be in China for two weeks, I made the conscious decision to leave the Vita home. Instead, I packed my pretty princess pink 3DS, with DoA Dimensions, Kingdom Hearts and Code of Princess on carts and Senran Kagura, Liberation Maiden, and Demon King Box on the SD card. I had to leave my only other retail title, Spirit Camera, at home as it relies on AR cards.

I wound up playing through two of these.

I was under the impression that Code of Princess was a 6-hour-or-less game, so that’s where I started.

It turned out to be a four hour and eight minutes game, so it really WAS a good place to start. It also turned out to be playable on a single 3DS charge – the power LED went red during the final boss fight and the battery held out through the closing credits like a champ.

There’s not much to say to the plot. There’s a peaceful kingdom, it gets attacked by monsters, there’s an evil queen behind it all, it falls to you to strap on your bikini armor and pick up your massively oversized sword and save the world. Along the way, you wind up with a big group of followers.

It does get some points in my book for having a genuinely likeable cast of characters and some good banter during the cutscenes. Sadly, there’s no Japanese language option, but you can mute the voice track to achieve a result that’s almost as good.

Even with it being a terrifically short game, I didn’t feel as though I’d been cheated in buying it. Part of that is probably because it was twelve bucks new on Amazon, of course, but it also felt like a complete experience. The main character (you can play as any of four different, but I stuck with the princess character) is kind of slow moving and her attacks have a lot of vulnerable frames to them. You can’t hope to win if you are constantly on the offense, so I found myself in the odd position of needing to learn how to block and dodge, rather than just mashing the A button to victory. The game is divided up into a bunch of missions – and you can go back and replay any of the earlier missions at any time – and they do a very good job of forcing you to learn the mechanics. The final boss fight, in addition to being the story climax, is really a final exam testing whether you’ve been paying attention up to that point. They certainly could have padded it out some more, but that’s where you have the option to play through the game as one of the other characters, I suppose.

So, overall, a nice use of a few hours of an international flight and a general thumbs up from me.

Posted in 3DS, videogames | Leave a comment

Beijing’s Yaneura – Maid Café From Hell

Posted on May 3, 2015 by baudattitude

I’m not going to claim that I’m any sort of Maid café expert, but I’ve been to a couple in Tokyo and one in Osaka, and my opinion is that they’re generally nice places to go if you’re in the mood for some light pampering and heavy pandering and a generally relaxing atmosphere. The ones I’ve been to have all been in the hearts of otaku shopping districts, and a few hours shopping in any of those will put anyone in the mood for a comfy chair and some classical music and an overpriced omelet with a heart drawn on it.

So, when I heard that Beijing had a maid café of its own, I had to go and check it out. This was a bit of an adventure, because the directions I had were not entirely complete and I don’t really understand Chinese addresses and the building it had been in was completely gutted when I DID find it and then it took me a while to find it at its new location.

The lobby of the former location. There was, at least, a map pointing me to the new restaurant.

Not that any of that is their fault, and walking that much DID get me really ready to eat something, so I was glad to finally find the place.

I got the sense something was wrong when I entered and was greeted with a half-hearted “okaeri nasai” rather than “okaeri nasai, goshuujinsama”. I don’t need THAT much pandering but it was a little jarring.

Leaving that aside, it wasn’t a great experience.

To start with, their front room had 8 tables set up for anywhere between 2 and 6 people. One of these tables was occupied. That left seven empty tables and they still seated me at the bar so I’d have my back to the room. Any attempt to look at the decor or, to be honest, watch the staff at work meant twisting around and staring.

The first menu they handed me was bilingual in Chinese and Japanese. I tried ordering in Japanese, and I got a blank look and a trilingual picture menu (English/Japanese/Chinese) and it was made clear that ordering should be done through gesture.

Yaneura is a little atypical in that it’s actually an izakaya rather than just a café, so it has a pretty full menu. I still ordered the omelet rice, which should be the symbol, in any maid-themed establishment, that Mr. Customer is in the mood to have something goofy drawn on his food. Usually, this is a heart, but I’ve seen some more creative stuff from time to time.

Mine came with sauce, but no art.

I also got a coke, which was delivered in the form of a 330ml can of coke and an iceless glass, plunked down with all the coquettishness of a drive-by shooting by whoever had drawn the “serve the foreigner” short straw.

Again, this is Maid Café 101 stuff here. You open the can for the customer, you pour it in the glass. If you’re looking for advanced marks you get them a bendy straw and stick it on in there.

About the only thing they got right, really, was to have five servers on duty in maid outfits, and the outfits were suitably frilly. There were also some anime tchotchkes stuck on shelves around the main dining area, so I guess they worked on the décor and uniform parts and called it good.

Several really basic maid café traditions completely ignored or done halfway, Yaneura had one last insult after I’d finished my food and paid the bill.

I went looking for the bathroom, and there were signs pointing me downstairs, and this was where stuff started to go a little Douglas Adams because the bathroom was in a basement that looked to have been ripped apart for remodeling and left that way, with lots of building materials lying around and virtually no illumination. The men’s room had two stalls; one had a chef’s apron draped over the door from the inside and cigarette smoke wafting over the door, the other was an Asian-style floor toilet that had been prodigiously used and not flushed.

Being faced with a massive pile of the last guy’s business just put a fine cap on the experience.

I’m trying to envision a scenario where I could put a happier face on this place. I guess if you speak Chinese, or are with someone who does, and you came in with at least a group of four, and you’d never ever ever been to a maid-themed establishment before so you had really low expectations it might be OK.

Oh, and maybe they’ll finish the basement one of these days too.

Posted in China, travel | Leave a comment

The sky above Beijing was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

Posted on May 2, 2015 by baudattitude

I have waited 30 years for an excuse to rip off Gibson. China provided that excuse.

When I went to the flea market at Panjiayuan, I had a rather pleasant conversation with one of the vendors, mostly about the weather which was quite frankly lovely at the time. His response was that the air was going to be terrible later on, and I wrote this off with a hint of smugness – after all, I used to live in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen a lot of smog.

At any rate, my conversation with this vendor was in the morning and I more-or-less put it out of my mind until deciding to leave the hotel, a little after five PM, to look for dinner. There was a famous restaurant street that I wanted to go to, and it was only a few stops away on the metro.

It was still quite pleasant out, at least as far as temperature. I’d say low 70s.

It was also nearly pitch black out. Well, not really pitch black. It was dark out, but there was light somewhere above – it just wasn’t reaching the ground. Likewise, the neon signs on buildings were diffused, fuzzy around the edges. The effect was very much like trying to see the world through static.

There were very few people on the streets, and most of then were wearing filter masks. I’d bought some in Shanghai as a precaution, so I congratulated myself on my foresight, put one on as well, and kept going.

I made it very nearly to the subway station before I realized that I was being an idiot and turned around to find food closer to the hotel.

It turned out that the lovely high temperatures and sunny morning had been the start of an inversion that had pumped Beijing’s AQI up from its typical levels in the 50-100 range to an off-the-charts 465, and also that the cheap filter masks I’d bought were just not rated to handle particulate on that scale. I had a sore throat for a couple of days afterwards.

For point of reference: The mainland China air quality scale tops out at “300+”, at which level it is recommended simply to not be outside if you can help it, as it can cause breathing difficulties even in normally healthy adults. There aren’t levels above that, but I’m going to classify this one as “The air is actively trying to kill you, please avoid breathing”

In addition to my crash course in air quality standards, I learned a valuable lesson about trusting the locals when they talk about weather. So it was really a very educational day.