Baud Attitude

Geek moment of the day…

Posted on February 28, 2013 by baudattitude

For several minutes on my morning commute, I was behind a car with a bumper sticker that said “CHACO”.

I spent the entire time trying to figure out what the first C might possibly stand for.

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Patchwork again

Posted on February 28, 2013 by baudattitude

When I played Patchwork back in December, I thought that it was a relaxing and thoroughly charming point-and-click adventure, but bemoaned the difficulty of actually finding somewhere to BUY the darned thing – it was distributed as part of an indie games bundle, and I only managed to pick it up because a distributor was selling the bundle for a few weeks after the initial offer ended. It was also effectively 8 bucks after currency conversion, which isn’t historically all that much for a bundle of five adventure games but I am spoiled by Steam sales.

Now the developer has gone and released it for free, so there’s no reason not to spend an hour or so of your life clicking around. 🙂

Download from Adventure Game Studio.

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My stuff, look at it.

Posted on February 18, 2013 by baudattitude

Speaking of regular Saturday night pencil-and-paper RPG groups, I got talked into signing up for YET ANOTHER social network type of thing, this one rather specific in its focus – it’s for people who collect Japanese figurines from games & anime, and it’s more or less a way to show off your collection and find out about all kinds of toys that you wouldn’t otherwise know existed. It could be a quite dangerous site, in other words.

It’s not perfect – it’s all done by community contribution and the database gets a little sketchy when you’re more than a decade back, so I have quite a few older figures that just don’t show up – but it’s pretty good and helps scratch the exhibitionist itch. It also lets me feel like I’m contributing when I send in photos of unpackaged figurines – far too many of the photos on the site are of poor entombed toys desperately longing to be set free of their plastic prisons.

Profile is here.

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Not sure which is nerdier…

Posted on February 11, 2013 by baudattitude

a) Having a regular Saturday night pencil & paper RPG group, or

b) buying this shirt from shirt.woot specifically to troll the members of my regular Saturday night pencil & paper RPG group:

Of course, there’s always option c), which is buying this shirt specifically to troll the members of my regular Saturday night pencil & paper RPG group, knowing that it’s based on an older design instead of the “G4” Friendship Is Magic designs, actually being AWARE that there have been multiple generations, and being pretty sure that – even in those older generations – none of them had a cutie mark on their foreleg.

Yeah, that’s probably about as bad as it can get.

If you need me, I’ll be in my living room watching the football, drinking the beer and practicing the belching.

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It was the Nineties, and there was Time for Pirates

Posted on February 9, 2013 by baudattitude

My most recent video fare has been a big plate of nineties anime nostalgia called The Enemy’s The Pirates!, a six-episode OVA series from 1990 based on a series of books that I’ve never read. My interest in the series, therefore, comes entirely from having seen the name of the series on various tape traders’ lists of anime way back when – it’s just one of those names that stands out in a list.

I never did get a chance to watch it back then, of course, because you had to be terribly careful in the numer of tapes you were asking for and other stuff always took priority. The USPS could only get packages of VHS tapes through the mail so fast, after all, and you were usually bugging someone who had a real life that didn’t involve copying tapes 24 hours a day.

So, when I found a nice modern digital version of it for download, I figured that I would finally get to satisfy my curiosity.

An anime series based on a series of books does, unfortunately, inherit all the issues that implies, such as being expected to know the characters and their backstory before you start watching. After all, who would be dropping a couple hundred bucks on the three LDs that made up this series if they weren’t already a fan?

Not knowing the characters or situations, therefore, I really had trouble getting into the show. The first couple of episodes introduce the main characters – two pirate-hunting detectives, one a girl-chasing gun-crazy loon and the other a cat-shaped walking stomach, their boss who hates them, a ditzy sidekick who wants to become a detective, a couple of pirates who majored in Dramatic Posturing and a perpetually-annoyed ship’s AI.

People shout a lot and the main character just randomly shoots things while he and his partner yell at each other. It’s like every bad cop show parody ever rolled into one, with the schtick being that they’re supposed to be hunting pirates… who aren’t really doing anything all that piratical. For the “bad guys”, they don’t ever really give you any reason to hate them except that they would presumably stop the Dramatic Posturing if they were dead.

Fortunately, in the third and following episodes, the series takes a quick exit from the Highway of Sanity and enters full-on Crazy Town, with a live-fire “baseball” game, where baseball has been resurrected as a sort of combat drill, a supercomputer who is turning everyone into cats, and, well, the problems that occur when your Horribly Beweaponed Space Battlecruiser’s AI gets hit by the same mutation and turns from this:

…into this, complete with an internal coal-fired boiler for propulsion

lagendracat

After the series gives up any pretense of sanity, it gets a lot more fun – even if the story never really reaches any real resolution. A couple of the pirates get caught or killed, one of the Bigger and Badder Pirates gets away to posture another day which is probably much more significant if you’ve read the books and overall it’s not a great way to spend three hours of your life. It did finally satisfy a couple of decades worth of vague curiosity, though, and I got a nice extra hit of nostalgia from seeing a credit given to SV2 for the translation script. Dave Fleming’s Nadia and 3×3 Eyes fansubs were some of the first I watched back when, and seeing “SV2” again was entirely unexpected on something I was watching in 2013.

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Is “Proofread Fail” hyphenated?

Posted on February 6, 2013 by baudattitude

Got a Dell catalog in the mail today, and I couldn’t resist poking maybe a little bit of fun when I noticed this:

And yes, nameless Dell catalog blurb writer person, I think it is supposed to be capitalized.

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Vegetables, Actually Quite Bad For You:

Posted on February 2, 2013 by baudattitude

One nice side benefit of all this DVD ripping and encoding I’ve been doing is that I occasionally stumble across something that I’d purchased and forgotten to actually watch.

Hence my sitting down for a three hour sessions with the 1981 BBC version of “The Day of the Triffids“, based on a science-fiction novel that I remember being one of my favorites as a youth.

I was also quite fond of When Worlds Collide / After Worlds Collide and Ariel, among others, which may just go to show that I had a taste for the post-apocalyptic.

And unicorns, apparently the first signs of my unicorn problem. Hmm.

But I digress and I will come back to that at some later time, possibly with the assistance of a trained mental health care professional.

So, Day of the Triffids it is, the lovely story of humanity’s struggle to survive when 99% of the human race is struck blind and hunted by carnivorous plants.

This is one of those things that is actually a heck of a lot more disturbing as an adult, I will tell you. As a kid, I never really made the leap from Everyone Is Now Blind to The Human Race Is About Two Weeks From Everyone Starving To Death, but it’s made rather more clear in the television version. To be honest, the triffids themselves – nasty as they are – are pretty much just the chocolate sprinkles on the sundae of human extinction. There’s an early scene in particular which drives it home – a mob of blind people manage to navigate the streets to the nearby grocer, where they break in the front windows and grab everything they can. Seeing a hungry woman trying to rip her way into a box labeled “Tide” quite prominently is one of the more disturbing scenes, made all the worse because – as with the best horror movies – the camera cuts away before you see the metaphorical knife strike home.

The rest of the series follows in similar fashion. The few sighted people left take various paths in the new world – some determined to save as many of the blind as they can, some purely out for themselves, most of them trying to rebuild civilization in whatever they see as the One Right Way To Fix Things And We’ll All Get It Right This Time.

My copy was a PAL DVD, but it seems that it’s been issued in NTSC format in the last few years. If you need a low-key and terribly British dose of the post-apocalyptic, I quite recommend it.

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Stretching definitions.

Posted on February 2, 2013 by baudattitude

Since browsing the iTunes App Store is an exercise in frustration for anyone interested in seeing what’s down under all the annoyed birds and running temples, I tend to rely heavily on Game Center recommendations and the “Customers Also Bought” section of the pages for apps that I’ve already tried and liked.

Sometimes this works out very well. I didn’t know that Sega had ported a Miku-based rhythm game to the US until I saw it in a “Customers Also Bought” and I seem to find a lot of pretty enjoyable tower defense games.

Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, and that brings us to Mandrake Girls, a game which seems determined to remove itself, as far as possible, from interactivity.

The premise of Mandrake Girls is pretty straightforward. You start off with a garden, which looks like this:

Only it doesn’t actually look like this when you start. You need to spend $1.99 to get rid of an advertising banner and unlock the bottom three garden boxes. As these sorts of games go, that’s not too onerous I suppose.

Anyway, after you’ve spent your $1.99, you get five garden boxes, each of which grows little mandrakes. You click on the mandrakes to harvest them and they pop out with a different random character. Harvesting each mandrake also gets you a small amount of in-game currency. If you let your entire garden box fill up, which takes about 12 hours, you can harvest a bunch of mandrakes all at once and you’ll probably get around 20 coins.

Lower garden boxes grow slower but have a higher chance of rarer mandrakes.

Most of them are cute girls, hence the name, though – to be fair – there are a few boys as well.

As you collect mandrake characters, they go into a book where you can look at the ones you’ve collected. Each one gets a description and you can further spend in-game currency to unlock an illustration of the character.

Some of these illustrations are straight out of the “What Not To Do” school of art as brilliantly skewered by The Hawkeye Initiative:

And some of the illustrations are a little less cheesecake but perhaps a little confusing:

Oh, and spiders will occasionally invade your garden and you can swat them:

That is, as far as I can tell, all you can do. I had expected, you know, some kind of minigames or something to DO with your horde of mandrakes, but there’s not much to do other than wait until you can harvest mandrakes, VERY occasionally get a new mandrake that goes into your book, save up coins to unlock the art for each mandrake and once in a while swat a spider.

Oh, and unlocking art for each tier of mandrake gets very expensive. The most expensive ones I’ve seen thus far cost 800 coins to unlock the picture, which would probably take a couple of week’s worth of harvesting to collect – or, of course, a modest in-app purchase if you think that seeing a new picture is worth, at the best conversion ratio from real money into one form of fake money into the other form of fake money, about 80 cents.

I will, however, give the authors credit for some very amusing achievement names:

In retrospect, this is one of the stronger arguments AGAINST trawling the darker depths of the app store. Sometimes, things sink to the bottom for a reason.

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Maybe a little uncivilized…

Posted on January 31, 2013 by baudattitude

Civilization is one of those long-running franchises that I’ve never really taken a crack at before. It’s got that… reputation to it, the one where you start playing at 8 PM with the goal of getting in just one or two turns before you go on to more productive uses of your evening, and the next thing you know the sun is peeking through the windows and you’re inventing another new illness to call in sick with.

It didn’t get me QUITE that badly, but it came pretty close. I had at least one four-hour session that I SWEAR did not feel like I’d been playing for more than an hour.

It’s a pretty dangerous game is what I’m saying.

Fortunately, I don’t think I have the patience to give it another go any time in the near future. I played through on the easiest difficulty level and the smallest map, and by the time my Cossack hordes were dropping nuclear bombs on the forces of Attila the Hun I was honestly pretty fed up with world conquest. If I DO play another game of it, I’m going to stick to a half dozen cities or less and work on one of the non-combat win conditions – managing twenty or thirty cities across the world just got tedious after a while and it might be fun to do more trading and espionage instead of just rolling over enemy cities (read: everyone else) and taking their stuff.

It did prove again that the Mac Mini I upgraded to a few months back is perfectly capable of handling itself when it comes to gaming, too – loading times were a little rough but it didn’t break a sweat otherwise.

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Happiness is…

Posted on January 30, 2013 by baudattitude

If you start typing “happiness is” into Google, it naturally gives you a great many suggestions. My personal favorite is “happiness is a red popsicle”, though I confess that spending the last 25 years on the Internet has me worried that I’m missing some hidden meaning there and that what I think is a wholesome and simple affirmation of joy is actually something dark and sordid.

But I digress.

At any rate, I should like to add my own entry to this list of happiness related items, and it goes something as follows:

“Happiness is an illicit 200 watt heater tucked under my desk, hopefully drawing too little power for facilities to notice and too quiet to be heard by passers-by in an office where the temperature is kept in the mid 60s for no logical reason”

It’s not as punchy as the Popsicle thing, I admit, but not having to sit at my desk with my coat over my lap all day is making every minute a little brighter.

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