hardware

Summary for January 2024

Hand delivery, fits in one hand, hand-made.

Kiki in a black dress with Jiji, her black cat, on a broom floats in the air over night fields dotted with the lights of small houses.

I read, watched, and re-watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. Well, kind of. The cartoon and the book are delightful, and more or less the same story (the book doesn’t have a dramatic finale). But the live-action movie… I couldn’t finish it, it’s cringe-worthy.

I bought a Mini PC. It solves a few problems:

it uses a lot less electricity;
it is silent at low load and slightly noisy at high load (I can compare the noise level to Nintendo Switch or Xbox Series S) – I have become more sensitive to mechanical and electrical noise lately, so this is a big plus;
it gives me a reason to daily drive Linux, since it can’t run “heavy” games (so installing Windows doesn’t make sense);
but it can run some games, which gives me an opportunity to test games on Linux;
not a problem, but tinkering is fun!

AMD logo

I’m not here to promote a specific brand, so I’ll say it’s an AMD Ryzen 5 5560U machine. AMD has served me well with my latest PC, since it is better with Linux, so that was one of the reasons I bought it.

So, yes, now it is my main work, media, some gaming machine. The worst thing is that it’s so small that I don’t have room to put a sticker of Chihiro on it. At this point, I name my machines after characters from Miyazaki’s works: I also have a big PC I built last year called Nausicaä, and a small laptop-tablet hybrid called Kiki.

This January marks one year since I started this blog. I have been tinkering with it ever since, but for this occasion I added a light theme and a search. Static sites have one disadvantage, they don’t do search themselves. You can mitigate this in a number of ways, I decided to go with DuckDuckGo. It seems to work well.

This is not about Quake ][

When you’re young, everyone is very eager to tell you that you’ll lose your strong opinions when you get older. I’m still waiting.

What actually happened to me is that I realized that it is impossible to have a strict rule – of law, moral, or any other kind – without many exceptions. Sometimes so many that it’s better to turn the rule on its head (from “it’s good unless” to “it’s bad unless” kind of thing).

I’ll use games as an example.

Quake 2 logo, a crescent moon with two nails through it on a green-purple gradient.

Let me put it this way, I’m not fun at parties: if you say to me “hey, remember that cool game?” I’m going to remember that it was published by a company that thought it was a good idea to advertise on 8chan, or that the developers were harassed and crunched a lot, or that despite having, like, two female characters, the game was both sexist and transphobic.

I also never thought that games were better back then, or that they ruined it, or anything like that. I felt like I evolved with the games, more or less. (To be fair, that has changed a bit in the last, say, 5 years or so, where I feel there are not enough games that challenge me with something new, but that is another story.)

Basically, what I’m saying is that I don’t do nostalgia. I don’t put old games on a pedestal. I rarely replay games.

But.

I spend about a week replaying the Quake II campaign, and playing all three mission packs, old and new, for the first time. I can’t deny that there’s a pleasure, a comfort in that experience. Q][ is my Doom. I played all the versions – PC, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. I found excuses to replay it a few times, like playing it with a Steam Controller.

Nostalgic? Sure. Old? Definitely. Replay? Absolutely.

Two images representing two achievements. On the left, a scantily clad female enemy, a cyborg with metal legs, a weapon for a hand, and many other metal parts embedded in flesh. On the right, a human soldier, a prisoner of war, cowering in fear on a conveyor belt, ready to be crushed by a metal device with spikes.

I’ll talk about the re-release in the monthly summary, for now I’ll just point out that I have complicated feelings about it. There’s a lot not to like about the game, and I can’t really come up with an argument for someone who’s never played it to give it a try. I don’t think there’s any undeniable value in it. But I like it, I still do.

I’m not writing this to make excuses. I’m not writing this to say that it’s okay to have problematic faves. I still believe there are hills to die on, and I have plenty of them. I’m writing it to say that you can only hope – I can only hope – that you have a decent grasp on those very fuzzy good and bad things and can apply them as best as you can. Because I’m pretty sure there is no alternative.

Summary for March 2023

March gameness.

The mouse dreams of a cheese.

The Spirit and the Mouse is a nice little game about, you guest it, a mouse that helps a spirit helping people with problems caused by a recent thunderstorm. Kind of a puzzle-platformer, except you don’t jump, you climb and fall. The mouse is female, by the way.

Hana the tanuki is running on a beach.

I think I collected everything in Lunistice, which means it is not a super hard game. I had about 40+ deaths in one level, but I finished it anyway because it felt mostly fair. Mostly because there is still a problem with precise jumping in 3D platformers, so some failures are clearly not on me. That minor annoyance aside, a pretty good platformer.

A Snufkin-like character plays a harmonica on a pier.

TOEM is just lovely. Running around, taking pictures to solve quests. Neat. Not sure what else to add, but I want to highlight it anyway.

Elil, the Muraena-like creature, asks a question: “Which one of these gods… is gonna create the new world this time?”

Mythic Ocean is a visual novel with some exploration. It’s hard to explain why I liked the story, partly because I don’t want to spoil anything, and partly because it’s a bit dreamlike: mostly fantasy, with a pitch of sci-fi, and some alegory thrown in. Just slightly fuzzy, you know, in a good way.

Firefly looking quizzically at a scarf.

I’m also a good indicator of point-and-click adventures: if I can complete one without a guide, there’s no “moon logic” in the game. She and the Light Bearer is a good one of those, quite beautiful with a nice story.

I wanted to check out the Mario Kart series, so I chose Mario Kart 7: it is relatively short (if you want to “finish” it in a sense) and you can play as Princess Peach. Pretty good, but I can’t say I loved it and want to play more or the 8th one. Burnout Paradise is my car game, so news that LEGO 2K Drive would be the blend of the two got me interested.

The in-fury-ating thing about Bowser’s Fury, is that all other characters with costumes and animations and whatnot are right there, so why are we stuck with just the mustachioed stereotype again? Other than that, I think this open-world structure is my favorite for games like this. Super Mario 3D World itself? Nah. I bet I’d love Odyssey, I just don’t want to! :/

Can you finish Tetris? I played through all the stages of Tetris Effect Connected, so *shrug*.

On the other hand, I did something that I almost never do: I stopped playing a game before the official end, but still consider it finished, with an asterisk. Dragon Quest Builders makes enough changes to a Minecraft formula, and some of them are pretty good and should be stolen by other games in the genre, but ultimately there are enough bad or pointless changes that I can’t justify playing another, what, three chapters? I backed up my save so I can return to it or, most likely, just play Builders 2 at some point. Or not.

It is not for me to judge whether stories like The Suicide of Rachel Foster should exist. What is a fair question is why only stories like this seem to exist? Why is it that almost every narrative game with a female protagonist is about that protagonist’s suffering, almost always at the hands of a man? Again, a valuable, very valuable story, but where are the alternatives that are so abundant for male characters?

Beasts of Maravilla Island, Behind the Frame and Paradise Marsh are in a category of games that, if you want to play something like that, that’s fine, they’re fine games. Fine. Really. But none of them grabbed me and actually reminded me that we’re way, way past the time when these cool, quirky, beautiful, unique indie games were a rarity and would have gotten a lot more attention just for existing. That’s kind of cool.

Continue playing the nonogram games. Finished Picross from S3 to S7, Club Nintendo Picross and Puppy Cross. Will include The Solitaire Conspiracy here, similar enough.

Firefly looking quizzically at a scarf.

I have heard this argument: if a VR headset costs like a cheap smartphone and looks like a sky mask, everyone would love VR!

I just dusted off my old original Oculus, de-Meta-ded it, and… I’m not sure. I still think VR will never replace computers, smartphones, or game consoles. To use an analogy, it’s like rock climbing, an activity you dedicate a certain part of your life to, rather than a bike you can use for commuting, long distance travel, pleasure rides, and a quick trip to the grocery store. Or maybe I just don’t like current VR and don’t see any games that are worth the effort. Was Moss cool? Yes, it was! Would it work as a non-VR title? Definitely! Would I choose the non-VR version over the VR version? Absolutely!

Summary for January 2023

What I did in January.

Installed Asuswrt-Merlin on my old router. It is a very conservative update, what I noticed: better VPN support, support for SMB2. Bonus point: can go back to the official firmware. I have looked at other firmwares, but at this point not sure if the improvements would be worth the hassle. Maybe a new router. Maybe not.

Amicia and Hugo, older sister and younger brother, the protagonists of the game, look at us rather determendly.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is in the “was a sequel necessary?” category, but is pretty good, so OK.

There are three last levels in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker that broke me, and soured the overall impression a bit. But otherwise a great game.

You play as Toadette for half the game. And the traditional kidnapping is presented as not really a kidnapping: Wingo wants a star, it’s just that Toad and Toadette can’t let go of their capitalistic nature and that star. Does that give Nintendo a pass? Not really, but I think it is a good example of Nintendo being less evil and more traditional to a fault. They would stick to a structure, but be willing to work on the periphery or in new areas.

Well, started this blog ~~for no apparent reason~~.