Microsoft Changes How We Earn Rewards Points via Gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Rewards program. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a program where you can earn points for doing things like answering quizes, using Bing to search, or more interestingly to me, playing Xbox Game Pass games. A point is worth a tiny amount; I tend to wait until I have 95,000 points to redeem them for a $100 gift card, meaning a single point is worth about a tenth of a cent. Seems not worth the bother, right? But they do add up and about twice a year I’m able to cash in a $100 card, plus I find the gamification of the system kind of mindless fun.

In terms of Game Pass rewards, most recently there were Daily, Weekly and Monthly tasks to complete. The Daily tasks were always “Play a Game Pass Game” and “Earn an Achievement in a Game Pass Game.” The first was trivial (it popped as soon as you opened a Game Pass title), the second was variable depending on what you were playing. The Weekly tasks were things like “Play 3 different Game Pass games” and “Complete 3 Daily tasks.” The Monthly tasks were where the big rewards were and they were basically an accumulation of the Daily and Weeklies, with the highest one rewarding 1000 points for doing 8 Weekly tasks and X Daily tasks, where X was a number around 45. This meant that you HAD to earn an Achievement in a Game Pass game once a day for about half the days of the month.

What this led to, at least in OCD folks like me, was “hoarding” Achievements. If I was playing a Game Pass game and I earned an Achievement I’d IMMEDIATELY stop playing the game for the day so I didn’t unlock another Achievement which ‘wouldn’t count’ for anything. I appreciate and admit this was entirely a “me” issue but based on conversations in the Microsoft Rewards reddit, I wasn’t the only one who did this.

Today all that ends. All the details are on Xbox Wire but the gist of it is, rewards based on Achievements are gone; all tasks will be based on just playing games. Good news for me. That said, you now have to spend 15 minutes in a game for it to count, so no more hitting the title screen and quitting, though I guess you could sit at the title screen for 15 minutes and that would work. There also seems to be a big focus on ‘streaks’ of playing 5 days a week, each week. Lastly there is a monthly “Game Pass 4 Pack” and “Game Pass 8 Pack” task which rewards us for playing 4 or 8 different Game Pass games, respectively.

And then the big news is, there are now equivalent rewards for PC gamers. Same rules seem to apply only now you’ll be playing on PC rather than on console.

As of today I am seeing these tasks on the Xbox app on my phone:

Play a PC game -> 10 points
Weekly PC bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
Play a game on console -> 10 points
Weekly console bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days

In the name of science I snuck off from work and played Borderlands Game of the Year edition on the Xbox for 20 minutes. This is NOT a Game Pass game but it counted for “Play a game on console” so it seems these do not have to be Game Pass titles. (Though I imagine in the case of PC it’ll have to be a game played via the Xbox app which for most of us means a Game Pass title.)

As a Game Pass Ultimate member I also have:

Play a Game Pass Game -> 10 points

Game Pass Monthly 4-pack -> 50 points
Game Pass Monthly 8-pack -> 350 points

Then there are streak bonuses.

Days 1-4 -> no bonus
Day 5 -> +40 point
Day 6 -> +20 points
Day 7 -> +40 points

These last numbers increase as you maintain your streak from week to week.

Week 2 -> x2 bonus
Week 3 -> x3 bonus
Week 4 & beyond -> x4 bonus

OK now the caveat is, this is a brand new system and I haven’t actually tested any of it yet. I’ll update the post if I find I’ve made any mistakes or if I’ve missed anything.

I haven’t done the math but I’m guessing there are fewer points to earn over the old system since Microsoft continues to decrease Rewards points over time, but for me personally I am super happy to see the end of tasks based on earning achievements. But we’ll see how it goes!

Are AAA Console Games an Endangered Species?

Posted on by Nimgimli

The other day I was browsing YouTube and came upon this rather depressing video about the death of console exclusives from Eurogamer:

The gist of it is that AAA games are getting too expensive and anyway young people don’t care about consoles; they play games on mobile or their PC. “They” say that young people don’t even have TVs but instead watch everything on their laptops. Based on my own circle of social media folks that I follow, I’m not sure that is limited to young people. I think more and more people in general just skip the giant TV in the living room and instead use their computer monitor.

Even though the video is about the end of console exclusivity, it also goes into a predicted decline of AAA games in general, just because they’re getting so expensive to make and the economy we live in is all about making maximum $$ for shareholders & CEOs with minimum investment in the developers and artists who actually make games. We’ve seen so many job losses in the industry over the past few years. (According to Wikipedia, there were around 25,000 job cuts in the gaming industry between 2023 and 2024.)

I don’t actually do a lot of PC gaming so I’m unsure of how many AAA games come out on PC exclusively but I’m guessing the number is pretty small and would be limited to titles from Valve or maybe Epic, just because these companies are invested in a storefront that can help them recoup the costs. If I’m wrong about this please correct me but it seems like the giant AAA games are generally console oriented, at least initially. I also guess there is some wiggle room in what we mean when we say AAA, too.

Assuming any of this is correct I do wonder what the future of gaming will look like. I too am someone who enjoys big blockbuster games played on a 65″ 4K TV, and I’d hate to see this experience fade. But what can we, as game consumers, do about it?

Realistically, not much. But I guess we can try to pay more attention to “AA” games, which is a tier that seems to be vanishing but maybe there will be room for it to come back when the AAA monsters stop sucking up all the development money. The Indie space seems healthy at least in terms of numbers of games coming out, though we’ve seen a fair number of indie developers close shop too. In that case it feels more along the lines of “We made a game and it didn’t make us enough $$ for us to stay solvent” vs “Our shareholders need more return on their investment so we’re axing a bunch of people.” Mind you how an Indie game gathers eyeballs when platforms like Steam are adding 19,000 games a year, I just don’t know, but that feels like a different issue so we’ll set it aside for now.

Not really sure where I’m going with this post. To a large extent I just wanted to surface that video but since I watched it I’ve been rolling this stuff around in my brain trying to make sense of it. The gaming scene I love is changing/dying off, I guess. But then so am I. I kid that my backlog is big enough that it would probably last me to my end of days, but it is legitimately true I think, assuming I keep playing at the rate I play and that I have another 15 years or so to spend on this ball of mud (15 years from now I’ll be 80). But I do feel like future generations will be missing out on something kind of wonderful if these big budget games go away.

Header image: A screenshot of the night sky in Horizon Forbidden West, exactly the kind of AAA game that I LOVE to play on the biggest screen possible!

Tweaking Sengi for Mastodon

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday the superb Scopique shared a 3rd party Mastodon app called Sengi. I’ve been testing it out and generally like it but for me personally the column widths were a bit narrow (320px) and there is no in-app way to customize this (yet at least).

Sengi comes in both a web-app and a stand-alone app version. There was nothing I could do to address the issue in the stand-alone app, short of recompiling it I guess. But that seemed like actual effort and the web app seems to work just as well as the stand-alone. I figured I could use Style Bot to fix things up, but the web app window is stripped down and doesn’t offer access to browser extensions.

This was pretty simple to work around. Open a regular browser tab and go to https://sengi.nicolas-constant.com/, then open Style Bot. I bumped the column width to 500px using these rules:


.main-display__stream-column {
width: calc(500px + 7px);
}

.stream-column,
.stream-column__stream-header,
.stream-statuses {
width: 500px;
}

Once Style Bot is set for the domain, you can go back to using the cleaner web app and your new styles will be applied. Or if you want a standard browser window, just keep using that.

I was initially going to share this on Mastodon but it seemed a little long, ergo the blog post.

December 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

Since it’s the last recap of the year, I guess we need to look back on the highlights of my year in blogging:
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OK now that that’s done, we can go on with the regular recap. I really had no highlights to speak of and I am once again asking myself why I even bother with this blog given how infrequently I post to it. I keep promising myself I’ll write more but time these days feels so precious and I never have enough to do all the things I want to do. Since blogging doesn’t frequently make it to the top of the list I guess I need to accept that it isn’t that important to me. But, y’know, inertia. I’ve been writing it for over 20 years.

Bah, that’s not a very upbeat way to start the final recap of 2024! I’m also stalling because I took no notes this month and can’t really remember what I played. [dramatic pause while I try to remember] OK I think I got it, let’s go!

Playing

At the end of last month I’d finished playing My Time At Portia and I almost immediately rolled into My Time At Sandrock but didn’t stick with it very long, just because I was dealing with a bit of “My Time at…” fatigue. I definitely plan to go back to it at some point after giving the series a bit of a rest. My immediate thoughts were along the same lines of everything I’ve read about Sandrock: it is like Portia, only better.

December was also the month I got back into MMOs, plural. Talk about not having enough time, right? I finally got into World of Warcraft‘s “The War Within” just about the time my sub ran out. I thought about resubscribing but when I compared the $15/month cost to the 4 or 5 hours/month I was playing, it just seemed silly. I’d just left the Isle of Dorn, which I very much enjoyed. Maybe at some point I’ll re-sub and just play through the story content. My general issue with MMOs is they never end so I can never ‘finish’ them and move on to one of the hundreds of single player games I really want to play.

I also got back into The Elder Scrolls Online, not that I remember exactly how that happened at this point. I think it was a super sale on the last expansion and all the expansions before it. I brought my Playstation account up to date then got sucked into the Golden Pursuits event they were running. When I got the free mount (pictured at the top of this post) it made me wonder why I’d bothered. That thing is hideous!!! But the event did push me out of my comfort zone. I did a PUG dungeon and 5 rounds of PvP Battlegrounds, just to advance the Golden Pursuits. Both were the type of content I generally avoid like the plague but in the end, they both went well. The Dungeon was even, dare I say it? Fun! Anyway I’m still playing ESO, casually. I paid for a month of ESO+ but don’t expect to continue that; ESO is a game you can play without the subscription if you just want to dabble. [Technically you never have to pay but when I’m playing seriously I find I really miss the ESO+ perks.]

And Warframe, which I actually wrote a post about. I’m still having a lot of fun there. There are so many types of content hidden away (hidden to those looking at the game from the outside, I mean) in this game. The other day I was running hoverboard races and pulling off tricks and stuff. Who knew?

Aloy stands in front of 2 giant vanquished machines
I realize this doesn’t look like much, but here Aloy is standing in front of 2 machines she had to defeat at the same time: a thunderjaw and a tremortusk. It was quite an intense fight!

Aside from MMOs I’ve been bouncing around various single player games, trying to finish something, somewhere, and completely failing. I REALLY want to finally finish Horizon Forbidden West and Death Stranding. I started Like a Dragon: Ishin and was having a great time but just drifted away. Oh and after watching the Borderlands movie I found myself back to playing Borderlands (the OG Borderlands). At least I finally tore myself free of being a slave to Fallout 76‘s Season Pass which kind of led to me finally stop playing.

I am noticing a bad pattern with me and Season Passes where I start to obsess over them which quickly leads to me playing a game not for fun but to try to advance the season pass. Doesn’t take long for that behavior to turn the game into just another daily chore to get through. This in turn leads to developing negative associations with a game that I initially was enjoying. Anyway I need to work on that aspect of my gaming personality. I don’t think ‘swearing off’ Season Passes completely is the answer; I need to find some kind of middle ground.

A screenshot from Borderlands, looking through the scope of a rifle at charging enemies
Back to making slow but steady progress in Borderlands 1

Watching

Again, didn’t take notes so…

Star Trek: The Lower Decks (Paramount+) final season was wonderful. I’m really going to miss this show but I expect I will re-watch it often over the coming years, as I do most Trek shows.

Silo (Apple TV+): We’re in the midst of Season 2 and man waiting a week for each new episode is killing me! We love this show! We went back and re-watched Season 1 which felt worth doing, just as a refresher and because we picked up some foreshadowing we missed the first time through. I’ve never read the books but Part Purple has, and we both enjoy it so make of that what you will.

Man on the Inside (Netflix): Ted Danson plays an elderly engineering professor who goes undercover in a retirement community even though he knows nothing about being a detective. I would like to say hilarity ensues, but it’s more like amusing warm feelings ensue. And some melancholy. It was a wonderful show, though also a bit frightening if you’re someone of my age!

Nobody Wants This (Netflix): Once we were done with Man on the Inside we headed over to another The Good Place alum, Kristen Bell and her new(ish) sitcom. We’re enjoying this one too but be warned it’s a bit on the raunchy side, but it has its share of romance too. We’re still in the middle of it but since it’s a sitcom I don’t anticipate any big wrenches being thrown into the works. Good fun so far.

Yellowstone (Peacock): I’m finally watching the 5th season of Yellowstone, mostly so I can cancel Peacock. I had Peacock for Premiere League Football but I rarely watch any more and I’m trying to cut some streaming costs here and there. If you haven’t seen Yellowstone somehow, the best way I can think to describe it is The Sopranos in Montana, only with more lawyers. I find it compelling even though almost every character is pretty awful.

Dr Stone (Crunchyroll): This has been my anime of choice this month. I liken this one to a survivalbox game in anime form. Something turned all humans to stone for 3700 years until one science geek ‘wakes up’ and figures out how to wake up others, while at the same time he tries to jumpstart technology using all his knowledge. It’s pretty fun so far (I’m still in Season 1).

Reading

A Christmas Carol gets read every year, and this year was no different.

Also finished Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks and rolled right into the sequel, A Knight of the Word. These are his “pre-Shannara” books and are basically urban fantasy. UF is not generally one of my favorite genres but this time out it is working for me.

And that’s about it for December. Next thing I’m looking forward to is Wuthering Waves coming to Playstation on Jan 2nd. I’ve heard so much good about this game that I’m really looking forward to playing!

Warframe: The Grind is Real

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warframe is a game I’ve tried to get into a bunch of times over the years but I’ve always bounced off it. Recently they’ve added a “Warframe 1999” event/chapter/I’m not sure what it is. I was so curious about it that I fired up Warframe yet again, this time on PC so I could start fresh.

For whatever reason it feels different this time. It might be that it runs so well on the PC; I can play it at a steady 144 fps (except maybe during transitions or cut-scenes) so it feels smooth as butter. Or maybe it is just that I DGAF any more so I am open to running missions with a random group and if I’m not as good or as fast as the others I don’t really sweat it like I used to.

Anyway for whatever reason I’m enjoying the game this time out, at least in the early stages. Since the last time I played they’ve added a lot more narrative and actual human characters to the game which gives me a bit more to ‘hook onto’. When I was just a disembodied spirit jumping from frame to frame it was hard for me to get invested. I’m also discovering facets that I’d either forgotten or was unaware of, like the fact that you can decorate your ship (see header image where my ship is decked out for the holiday).

A Warframe talks to one of the denizens of Cetus

I’ve now come to the point where I need to build a new Warframe (I could of course just buy some Platinum and buy a ‘frame but that seems like cheating) and wow, the grind is real. Here’s where I am so far:

One of the first Quests (yes, there are quests now) has you go to the Cetus open world zone on Earth to help track down some info. When you finish that, you get the blueprint for Gara, a Warframe. But you can’t just build Gara, first you have to build her components. And you need blueprints for those components. You get those from doing bounties on Cetus. Simple enough; I did a bounty and got one of the component blueprints.

I headed to the Foundry in my ship to build that component and discovered that one of the materials for it is, yup, something you need to build. A sub-sub-component. You have to buy the blueprint for it from a vendor on Cetus. Back to the planet where I find the vendor and, nope, I can’t buy it because my faction standing isn’t high enough. I earn faction by doing bounties, so I go and do more bounties until I have enough faction points to rank up.

Next I go to the reputation dude and, yep I have enough points but I need materials to rank up and I don’t have them.

So now I have to either run missions on Cetus or just roam around and try to find the materials I need so I can rank up my faction on Earth so I can buy the blueprint so I can make the sub-sub-components (which might require materials I have to grind for) so I can make the sub-component for Gara (which also might require materials I have to grind for), and this is just one of 4 sub-components.

Yeah, you need to enjoy the grind to enjoy Warframe, I guess. The good news is I’m finding the gameplay to be super fun so I don’t mind, but I do think I’m going to play Warframe as a ‘side-game’ because if I just hard-core focus on getting all this stuff it’s quickly going to become a chore. But I don’t HAVE to build Gara right away and there’s a ton of other things to do and a bunch of Quests to get through before I get to Warframe 1999 (still not exactly sure what that even is) so I’m pretty content for now.

Also me being my weird-ass self I’m dabbling in it on PC, Xbox and Playstation and created a Clan that all 3 of my characters are in, so “we” are gonna see if we can build out our dojo together which requires, you guessed it, grinding for materials!!

A Warframe orbitor flies over some evergreens on the earth zone

The Game Awards 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night was the 10th annual The Game Awards show and in the run-up to it, social media [or more accurately, my view into social media] was full of people who are critical of the show. I haven’t checked in to see if anyone has changed their minds but it’s the Internet so I doubt it.

I have had my criticisms of the show over the years but I do always watch it. I’m one of those who isn’t really interested in the awards themselves but is more there for the trailers than anything.

This year, I don’t really have any criticisms. I thought it was well done. Having Statler and Waldorf, the cranky old guys from The Muppet Show who specialize in heckling, was weird but for me it worked. They were like the voice of the Internet, shooting insults at Keighley as he stood on stage looking uncomfortable. Jokes along the lines of (and I paraphrase) “Why are there empty seats? We all know that Keighley is always a sell-out” brought to mind cringey Doritos ad placements from years past. They also made joked about the Elden Ring DLC being up for game of the year awards (something that seemed to draw a lot of criticism on the socials) and just ranting about how the show is too danged long (3.5 hours).

I feel like Keighley allowing himself to be criticized like this is a sign of maturity. Another was his admission that they really struggle with how to handle the terrible state of the industry right now, with so many thousands of game creators being laid off in the last few years (going from memory I think the figure was 34,000 creators losing their jobs).

The answer to that last bit was the creation of a new award, I think it was The Game Changer, and giving it to Amir Satvat, a guy who loves gaming and decided to try to do something to help those who have lost their jobs. He created a free service to help folks find new positions in the industry. Heck why not just take a look at the segment:

There were some wet eyes in our house when we watched that segment.

Another new addition was having winners from last year come in to introduce awards from this year, which was a subtle but welcome change.

Other improvements, in my opinion, was what was removed from the show. While there were some celebrities, none of them were super cringey. In fact the most uncomfortable moment may have been when Harrison Ford came on-stage just because (remember he is 82) he seemed to have trouble reading the teleprompter. But hey he is Harrison Ford, we cut him some slack, right?

In general the show just didn’t seem to be trying too hard to be hip, y’know? There were no edgy “influencers” on stage. The whole show was hosted by Keighley and Sidney Goodman; both of whom of course have a lot of experience with hosting events like this.

As to the game trailers themselves, there was a pretty good mix of styles and genres, though to some extent what gets shown depends on what is getting made, which right now means a lot of grim-dark melee-based souls-likes.

So yeah overall I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to next year. To heck with the haters!

Oh and maybe it’s because I have kind of a nerd crush on Laura Bailey, but this was one of my favorite segments:

November 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

November is gone already!? I have to say having US Thanksgiving fall so late in the month has really thrown me off. For the past couple of years we’ve had nearly a week between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, but that won’t happen again for a while. Anyway point is the end of the month caught me completely unprepared, AND I haven’t been taking any notes to speak of. Good thing I don’t have much to report.

Playing

My Time At Portia — I mentioned last month that I had started playing this on PS5 and this month I really leaned into it. Last time I checked I had 120 hours played on PS5. Just this weekend I got the Trophy for finishing the “main story” but the game just keeps rolling on with more story-quests. That said, I think I may be done for a few reasons. First is that this game is terribly optimized for console. On Playstation (and from what I’ve read, on Xbox) it’s just terribly laggy, particularly in combat. I mean the frame rate drops into probably single digits when you start fighting in a dungeon. For most of the game fighting is pretty limited so it wasn’t a big deal, but now there is some dungeon I’m supposed to work through which is all combat and that’s not something I’m looking forward to. Second is that My Time At Sandrock exists and everyone says it’s a better game so I just feel like if I want more “My Time At..” action I should move on to that.

Also I’m sort of out of new things. My workshop (that’s it at the top of the post) has fully upgraded buildings, a factory, a farm with automated irrigation and it’s been a long while since I got new plans to build. So now it all kind of feels repetitive. I could buy more land and there are still house upgrades I could get, but the house decorating is pretty bad. (For instance you can place a table but you can’t put anything on the table.) I never got into the romance aspects because ‘dates’ are not much fun and involve a lot of running around. Plus I had stuff to build!

And y’know, I have SO many other games waiting in the wings, including a replay of Dragon Age Inquisition I was toying with, before jumping into Veilguard. But that’s another 100 hour game so not sure I’m up for it.

Also it’s delightfully ironic that I bought a PS5 Pro and then spent the month playing a low-poly, poorly optimized PS4 game on it!

But really Portia is the only thing I spent much time on. I logged into World of Warcraft a few times then my sub ran out and it seemed silly to renew it given how rarely I play right now. I may circle back at some time. I never even got to The War Within after buying it!

Watching

Interview With The Vampire (Netflix) — We watched the movie, then the series. The movie was kind of bad in my opinion, but the series was actually pretty good. I’ve never read the books so can’t compare them but it all just felt darker to me.

Silo (Apple+) — With the new season here we decided to go back and re-watch S1 before jumping into the new stuff and I’m glad we did. There was a lot of texture to the show I’d kind of forgotten, plus it somewhat rewards a 2nd viewing because you catch foreshadowing details once you know where the story is going.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (Crunchyroll) — Weird title, but a rather sweet anime. There is something called “Puberty Syndrome” impacting students where they feel so unseen that they start to vanish, among other strange things. The title comes from an early scene when protagonist Sakuta, the titular Rascal, notices an attractive young woman in a bunny suit cavorting around in a library. This is Mai, the other main character, and she is trying to get a reaction out of anyone. Turns out no one can see her other than Sakuta. Thus a friendship is born. From there the story goes all over the place as Sakuta and Mai become a couple and try to help out others with Puberty Syndrome.

Reading

Kahayatle by Elle Casey — This was in our Kindle library; I guess PartPurple bought it at some point. It’s kind of “Lord of the Flies” on a grand scale. A plague has killed off all the young children and adults, leaving the world nothing but teenagers, and you can imagine how well that goes. For reasons never made clear a bunch of them decide to become cannibals rather than scavenging for food or hunting animals. The protagonist is a young woman who solves all her problems by beating the shit out of people, after which they become her friends for some reason. I started reading this before Halloween and thought it was poorly written but it suited the season. That said it has over 4 stars at Goodreads so maybe I’m just a grump.

Warpaint by Elle Casey — The next book in the same series as Kayayatle. Now the protagonist is living in the Everglades with some Native American kids, bludgeoning her way to leadership. When I realized there were 4 books in this series and it just felt like the same thing happening over and over, I bailed on it. Maybe I’ll come back to it next year in Spooky Season but for now, this is a Did Not Finish title.

Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks — I learned recently that Brooks has written something like 30 books in the Shannara series; I had no idea. Then I saw that this was the first one chronologically and it is urban fantasy that takes place in our world. I was fascinated by that. I assume, but do not know for sure (don’t spoil me!) that the world of Shannara is actually some far future earth. Or maybe there’s a portal or some kind of inter-dimensional thing going on? Who knows? But I mean to find out!

So far this is about a small town in the midwest where a demon, in the guise of a human, is sowing discontent while a young girl who can see magical creatures, both good and evil, tries to stop him. I don’t want to go too far into it because I don’t want to spoil things too much, but there’ve been some fun twists and turns and the writing is generally pretty good. I’m enjoying this one so far but 30 books is a daunting task to read. I can’t imagine having written that many. The first Shannara book was published in 1977 so I guess it HAS taken him almost 50 years. Terry Brooks is 80 now but apparently still writing!

And that’s November, such that it was. Overall it was a mixed month. Early on we were still dealing with COVID fatigue and work was an absolute horror show. But there was feasting the Thanksgiving, the weather finally turned cool and dry, I got a new console and I did a LOT of gaming, even if it was mostly just one game. And I’m starting December with a week off, so that’s nice! Maybe I’ll manage to write a blog post or two this month, you never know!

Initial Reaction to the PS5 Pro

Posted on by Nimgimli

It wasn’t the most fiscally responsible thing I’ve ever done, but I wound up getting a Playstation 5 Pro despite its hefty price tag ($700US) and Sony’s cheap decision to not include a vertical stand, which cost me another $30 or something. It arrived late yesterday and I honestly haven’t had a lot of time with it but I just wanted to capture a few immediate reactions to it.

First the unboxing! It was packaged poorly, to be honest. The console itself was in there securely but the cables and the controller that comes with it were not and could rattle around in the box (though in a section separated from the console so they couldn’t damage it). This hasn’t seemed to harm anything but it wasn’t a confidence builder. You pick up an item this expensive and you hear parts moving around inside the box and you think “Uh oh.”

The console itself is smaller and lighter than I expected it to be. The power button is labeled now! No more groping my console looking for its “On” button. 🙂 The lights are lower down (when the unit is standing on end) which I find a little less distracting. The cover panels come off MUCH more easily than on the OG PS5.

Set up was a cinch. I turned off the OG PS5, unplugged the cables. Plugged them into the PS5 Pro and turned it on. As expected there was a software update and while that ran I opened the OG and took out the expansion SSD I’d installed. Once the Pro was done updating itself, I shut it down, opened the panel and installed the expansion SSD and plugged in the external drive that I store PS4 games on. Turned it back on and it did a “Rebuilding Database” sweep and then the games on my expansion SSD and PS4 games on the external drive were all ready to play. You CAN transfer data between two PS5’s but I decided I’d rather just re-download the stuff on the internal storage since I had a lot of junk on my old unit.

So what about the games!? Well the first game I booted was… erm, “My Time At Portia” which is a PS4 title not known for its fancy graphics. What can I say, I’m hooked on this silly game! The PS5 Pro has a toggleable option to “Enhance” PS4 games so of course I turned that on. It seems to just smooth things out for the most part. It was most noticeable in the UI and on screen text which was cleaner and sharper than I was used to. It also seemed to improve background images, like mountains in the distance. Actual character models and such didn’t seem to be impacted. I was pleased but not floored by the changes, but that’s just 1 PS4 game tested.

Then I tried Horizon Forbidden West and OH MY GOD what a difference the PS5 Pro makes. Most games these days (this is for you PC gamers out there not familiar with console-land) have two graphics options, a high fidelity 30 FPS mode and a lower fidelity 60 FPS Performance mode. I virtually always go with Performance Mode because I find 60 FPS gaming is both more responsive and more comfortable. Back in the 30 (or lower) FPS days I had some issues with motion/simulator sickness playing certain games, but that has gone away since I’ve been sticking to 60 FPS.

Anyway, with HFW you basically get (at least) the graphics quality of the OG PS5’s Fidelity mode, only at 60 FPS. It looks so much better. The lighting seems really beefed up too. It’s like a completely different game. There IS also a PS5 Pro Fidelity mode (that runs at 30 FPS) and I will have to at least sample that at some point. I can’t imagine how much better the game can look!

So that’s a pretty small sample size but the weekend is almost here! I’ll be testing a LOT of games this weekend!

Overall though, I’m happy so far. Honestly happier than I feared I would be. I kept reading reviews that were like “If you sit really close to your TV, this is the console for you. Otherwise you won’t see any difference.” I sit a normal distance from the TV (55″ TV, maybe 8-10 feet from it depending on if I’m leaning forward or lounging back?) and these reviewers are on crack. Maybe comparing like for like it seems that way. Like taking the Best Graphics mode on the PS5 and comparing it to Best Graphics on the PS5 Pro? Maybe? But being able to get the really good graphics at 60 FPS is a HUGE difference, and that is exactly why I bought the thing.

While watching a preview on Digital Foundry one of the guys said something like “If you’re a person who is always agonizing over whether to play at 60FPS with lower graphics, or getting the best graphics but dealing with 30 FPS then this is the console for you.” and that is exactly who I am and it was this one line that sold me on the Pro. I always wind up at 60 FPS after first sampling the pretty 30FPS and then I’m kind of disappointed at the 60 FPS image quality. Now I can have both.

Couple elephants in the room. The PS5 Pro does not come with a disk drive. For me personally this doesn’t matter but I know it matters a lot to many people. You can get an add-on drive but it’s like $80 more or something which is a fairly significant bump to an already very high price. Second, over on reddit there’s some folks complaining about coil whine. I haven’t noticed this but at 64 years old my hearing isn’t the best anyway, particularly when it comes to high pitched sounds like coil whine. So that might be something to watch develop. It could be a real issue or it could be an Internet molehill being turned into a mountain.

And all that said, I’m not here to sell anyone on a $700 console, because the price is pretty danged high. Though if you were shopping for your first PS5, I’d say the jump from the $500 OG to the $700 PS5 Pro is probably worth it. On top of the better performance you get a 2nd TB of storage (which would otherwise cost you $100 or so) and a smaller, nicer looking console. But if you’re a casual PS5 owner then you can almost certainly find a much better use for $700. I’m just an old man who sometimes over-indulges in retail therapy.

That said, I’m really pleased so far.

October 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

The end of this month has really snuck up on me; it’s been a weird one. October 2024 was the month that COVID finally caught up to me and it really threw things into disarray. Ironically, I’m about 90% certain that I caught it by going to a local drugstore for a vaccine. I’m basically a recluse and it is rare that I go into a building with other people, and in this case there was a clearly sick 20-something young woman sharing the waiting nook and and ‘get the shot’ room with me. She was wheezing and sneezing and clearly ill. Stupid me hadn’t thought to bring a mask and she wasn’t wearing one, of course. A few days later the symptoms started showing. A few days after that, @partpurple started showing symptoms

Anyway the good news is I didn’t wind up in the hospital or anything, but it really disrupted my gaming for the month. I had been doing a lot of PC gaming but COVID sent me retreating to the couch and the consoles. I mostly worked and slept for a good two weeks but in the short times I was awake and free I worked my way through the Diablo IV expansion, and then I was looking for something cozy to play. I tried a number of games but knew what I really wanted and that was My Time at Portia, a game I’d played in the past but had never finished. I owned it on PC but not on console.

That prompted me to finally get my Steam Deck working again. It had been busted since last winter. I finally hooked it up to an external monitor and it was sitting at some kind of boot menu. I got past that and everything started working EXCEPT the screen. As long as it was hooked to an external monitor it worked great, but that kind of misses the point.

They say that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, but that is what I did, looking up various combos of button presses to cause the Steam Deck to reset itself or something. And eventually it worked but there’s no way I could ever repeat the steps because I just lost track of how many times I held 2 or 3 buttons for 10 or 15 or 30 seconds, but suddenly the screen lit up and things have been fine since.

I started playing My Time At Portia on the Steam Deck but soon realized my COVID-tearing eyes weren’t up to the task. Then I tried using Steam Link to play on the TV and that worked, sort of. I think my issue is that my PC has a 1440P ultra widescreen monitor and the TV is a 4K. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but the result was the game showed up on the TV with letterboxing bars all around. It worked but didn’t look great. Finally I broke down and just bought My Time At Portia on the PS5 and started enjoying that.

Then work blew up and the last two weeks has seen plenty of 12 (or more) hours days, just putting the final touches on an overall pretty crappy month. Also it is Halloween and 80F so.. man, October has sucked!

Playing

The only game I spent any significant amount of time with was :

The Plucky Squire — I mentioned this one last month, but I finished it early this month (before COVID). I really enjoyed it until the very end. For most of the time I spent playing it was this charming and chill experience. Exploring, puzzle solving and some mini-games that weren’t that hard. But then at the very end of the game the mini-games all returned in a much harder variation. One in particular, a rhythm game (which I suck at) really frustrated me. I got through it all and enjoyed the ending credits but it really dampened any enthusiasm to replay it or trophy hunt. In the end it took me 18 hours to get through, of which like 17 were just amazingly fun and charming, and then an hour of frustration at the very end!

Watching

We’ve been watching a bunch of supernatural stuff that originated on AMC but are now on Netflix. We finished A Discovery of Witches, which was fine. Then The Mayfair Witches which was a little more creepy/spooky and I liked that one better. Now we’re onto Interview with the Vampire which so far I’m liking more than the old Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie, which @partpurple insisted I watch before we started the series.

I also finished Station Eleven which I’d started last month, and which I enjoyed. It felt like a different kind of post apocalypse story, I guess.

And that’s pretty much all I remember. I watched a LOT of YouTube and specifically Critical Role sessions because they are so long. I tended to just sleep/doze through them. For real I was sleeping like 20 hours a day on weekends when I could get away with it, and I’m STILL sleeping a lot more than 2 weeks since I first showed symptoms.

Reading

I finally finished The Tower of Swallows, one of the Witcher novels. There are two more in the series that have been translated. Not sure if there are more or if the author is still writing them. But I finally accepted the fact that I just don’t enjoy them very much. Love the games, loved the Netflix show, but the books just don’t hit right with me. There’s a TON of world building but the actual plot moves so very slowly that I just kind of lose track of it.

Now I’m reading Kahayatle by Elle Casey. I found it in our Kindle library and imagine @partpurple bought it at some point. It is terrible. The writer isn’t very good; I think she self-published these. The premise is some disease killed off all the adults and young children so we now have a world-wide Lord of the Flies situation and for some reason most of the population seems to have turned into cannibals, or “Canners” as they call them for some weird reason. I keep telling myself I have to stop reading it because it is written so badly, but at the same time it is so ‘lite’ that the pages fly by. I think it is part of a trilogy and I assume we own all the books so we’ll see how long it takes me to give up on them.

I’m not a writer so I don’t feel qualified to critique Elle Casey but there is just a vibe I get from new writers where they haven’t learned the art of ‘sketching’ with words, so they tend to over explain small details, almost like they’re writing a movie script or something. So every time a character sticks their tongue out or makes a ‘raspberry’ at another character… I know the author is trying to convey that here is a kind of light-hearted moment in the midst of all this awful, but it just feels over-written and over-detailed and comes off feeling fake. I’m not good at describing this feeling because, again, not a writer, but I can sure feel it when I’m reading and it snaps me out of the world.

Melville was able to write super detailed accounts of how things work in the middle of his novels, but in my experience he’s about the only author I know who has mastered this. So when your characters decide to remove a flag from a bicycle, you can just say they removed the flag. You don’t have to show us how they went to find a wrench and how the nut was a little rusted but with some elbow grease it finally came free and it got unscrewed and the flag was removed. We don’t need all those details; our imaginations can fill in all of that.

On the other hand when a character is pinned under a bigger adversary so that one of her arms is trapped under her body, and she gets free by biting her adversary in the crotch, that makes me stop and puzzle out what their position was and how that worked. Like I dunno, you have to pick your details battles, I guess?

Anyway she wrote a bunch of novels and I didn’t so I should just shut up. But I can’t really recommend Kahayatle even though I’m still reading it. 🙂

And that’s October, the month of COVID & couches and too much work and not much else. Here’s to a better November!

 

Finally Figured Out My Issue With Diablo IV

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was a late-bloomer when it came to Diablo IV. I waited for Microsoft to buy Blizzard-Activision and put the game on Game Pass before I ever played it, aside from maybe a beta weekend or something. And when I did it was….fine, I guess?  But it didn’t really hook me like I hoped it would.

I keep going back every new season and I even pre-ordered the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred. Last night I finished running through that storyline, which I actually enjoyed more than the base game campaign (which left so light an impression on me that I couldn’t really tell you what happened except we killed Lillith) and now the game opens up and… I think I’m done.

But I still keep THINKING I should like this more, and most of that is probably based on very fond memories of many long hours playing Diablo and Diablo 2.  Still it has taken me a long time to kind of untangle my thoughts and decide why I don’t vibe with it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The lesser reason is that the moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t very interesting. It feels like a ton of sizzle with not a lot of steak. Yeah at first it’s fun to just wreck huge clumps of baddies but, at least when playing solo so you’re not having to coordinate with anyone, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of thought or skill in it. Heck a lot of the time you can’t even SEE your character in all the chaos. Yes, there’s thought and skill that goes into putting together your build, for sure, but once you get that where you like it, you just kind of go through the same rotation over and over, with the only real decision on when to fire off an evade or an ultimate.

That’s pretty true of a lot of MMOs but honestly a lot of MMOs have pretty boring combat when playing solo which is why I generally don’t stick with them for very long, either. Maybe I just have never gotten to the ‘good parts’ of Diablo IV to get to the really interesting boss fights and stuff and I kind of feel like I should at least try to get there, but then there’s the Big Reason to discuss.

The Big Reason I have an issue with D4 is the Season system. A season starts, you roll a new character, and you play that character until the season ends. Then your character (and I always get very attached to my RP characters) goes to the Eternal Realm to languish. Another season starts, tempting you with all kind of shiny goodies to earn, but you need a new character for the new season so you’re starting all over again. As a CASUAL player this drives me nuts because I never feel like I make any progress.

Basically playing Diablo IV feels to me like playing the Beta of a new MMO where characters are wiped after every beta phase, and the game is NEVER going to launch. If I was a dedicated player and wound up finishing each season and maybe maxing out a few characters, this might not feel so bad, but I never get that far. I just don’t play enough (so to be clear, this is a ME problem, not an issue with the game). The only reason I’ve finished the Vessel of Hatred campaign is because I’ve been sick as a dog and laying on the couch needing something mindless to play and D4 was perfect for that.

I guess I just wish there was a way to carry over your characters, or some perks or benefits, from season to season. Or some kind of track in the Eternal Realms that made it seem worthwhile to play there. SOMETHING persistent to hang on to. But as it is, playing Diablo IV for me is like starting a bunch of projects and then having them taken away from me before I can ever finish any of them, and that is super unsatisfying.

Screenshot of Neyrelle from a Diablo IV cut scene
My face when I know the season is about to end and my character is going to the black hole of the Eternal Realm