Category: Pointless Ramblings

Xbox One X and my weird graphics fetish #FirstWorldProblems

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m in a tough spot. You see Assassin’s Creed Origins launched today. I pre-ordered it on the Xbox platform to get the pre-order goodies (I love the Assassin’s Creed games, aside from AC 1 — yes I know its cool to hate the series but I’m too old to be cool), but the reason I chose Xbox over PlayStation was because I wanted to use it as a test platform for the Xbox One X. How much better will games look on the XBX than on the PS4Pro? I need to know.

Problem is, XBX doesn’t come out until a week from Tuesday. Now I have to either not play my new game, or play it on a less than optimal system. Decisions, decisions.

Look, I’m not a hipster millennial. (Is that a thing or do you have to be one or the other?) I LOVE great graphics. I remember when EGA was a big deal and no, I don’t want to go back to those times and play pixel-art indies. Fie on that. I say again, FIE! Give me gorgeous high resolution graphics AND gameplay I love. It’s not too much to ask, at least not until single player games die.

And yes, let’s nip the inevitable discussion in the bud: I realize PCs offer the very best graphics available. For reasons that could occupy a whole other blog post, I am no longer interested in gaming on the PC. Please just accept and understand that everyone is different and for ME personally, PC gaming is off the table.

Meanwhile, I have Middle Earth: Shadow of War on the PS4 Pro. Love the game. But then someone did a comparison of it on the XBX and the PS4 Pro and it looks better on the XBX. This was from a demo at a show so it’s hard to say if it plays better, but it clearly looks better thanks, presumably, to the addition video ram in the XBX (as compared to PS4Pro). You get higher detail textures on the XBX; the Digital Foundry guys suspected they were loading in 4K textures created for the PC that the PS4Pro didn’t have the memory to handle.

So now I find myself not wanting to play Shadow of War on the PS4Pro anymore. I keep thinking I should rebuy on XBX…but I want to play it now. Plus I had a Nemesis to import on the PS4 since I completed Shadow of Morder on that platform (got the Platinum for it, in fact).

So now I find myself replaying Shadow of Morder: Game of the Year edition on the Xbox One so that I can have a nemesis to import into the Xbox version of Shadow of War IF I decide to re-purchase.

Because 4K! And HDR! And better textures! Also, for AC Origins, Dolby Atmos, but I need to buy the $15 headphone app for that since I don’t have Atmos audio in the room.

I mean, let’s be clear. These are nice problems to have. Too many great games that look too good. Am I right? I just really want to get the XBX in my hands to make sure I like it. Mostly I worry about how loud it is, and if the UI is finally snappy. Though already the most recent update to the Xbox UI seems faster than the old one.

Eh…. maybe I should play the Switch until November 7th. Ha! That’s a joke. I was being silly. I don’t play the Switch. The Switch collects dust.

Learning Japanese (sort of)

Posted on by Nimgimli

They (I don’t actually know who ‘they’ are) always say that learning a second language is supposed to be a good brain training exercise and a few times over the years I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to learn Japanese. Mostly it was because I wanted to play imported games and/or watch anime in the original language, but I never got very far. Japanese is HARD (for me at least). First of all they have 3 (maybe more?) written languages: hiragana, katakana (??) and kanji. So before you learn what the words mean, you need to learn the ‘alphabets’ so to speak.

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist so it’s almost 100% certain I will get some/all terms wrong in this post.

About a month ago Duolingo added Japanese to its Android app and kind of on a lark I downloaded it and started ‘learning Japanese’ and I put that in quotes because a month later I know some of the hiragana and if a Japanese teacher said to me — very slowly and with perfect enunciation — “Nice to meet you” I would probably understand. Or maybe I’d just think “I know that phrase but can’t recall what it means.” More likely the latter.

Still though, I’m actually enjoying the process. My latest project is figuring out the Japanese eShop on the Switch. Next week there’s a demo of Monster Hunter XX hitting the Japanese eShop so I set up a Japanese Nintendo account so I’ll be able to download it. Of course the store is mostly in Japanese. I’m sure I could stumble through it but just for grins I decided to try to translate some of the words.

The first word on the left menu was “NEW” and I translated that one pretty easily.

The next word was ランキング

I knew I’d learned some of these characters but couldn’t bring them to the front of my brain so I went looking at hiragana charts and couldn’t find any of them. Y’know why? Those are katakana symbols. In fact that was when I learned that katakana was different from hiragana. So once I knew that, it was pretty easy since katakana is used for ‘borrowed’ words from other languages. The characters in order are pronounced RA N KI N GU. It means exactly what it sounds like: ranking. So basically this is a listing of games my ranking, or most popular. (What helps a lot is I know pretty much what to expect because this is an e-shop for games.) I was pretty proud of that.

The next one was harder: もうすぐ発売

So the first thing is, I’m copying and pasting these characters from other websites. Different websites in this case which is why they’re kind of mis-matched. The characters on the Switch aren’t exactly the same. I guess fonts are a thing no matter the alphabet you’re using. So this one is a combination of hiragana and kanji. The hiragana part was pretty easy for me. Translated into romanji (Japanese sounds spelled out in the Roman alphabet) it says mo u su gu. Then I put mousugu into a romanji to english translator and I get “soon.” Given that this is the eShop it’s pretty obvious this is the “Coming Soon” list already but I want to do the full translation.

Looking up the kanji characters is HARD. I mean it isn’t hard if you look them up from this blog post because you can cut and paste them, but I was looking at them on the Switch, which may as well have been a piece of paper. I found Jisho.org which is super cool. It lets you look up kanji characters by ‘radicals’ which are the parts of a kanji character.

So for the first character, I first selected the “legs” from the bottom half, then the crossbars. That narrowed the selection of potential kanji characters down enough that I could find the one I wanted. Here’s a pic (click it to make it big enough to see):

You can see that those two ‘radicals’ were enough to help me find the character, labeled #3 above.

But here was a curious thing. Once I found it I looked it up and translation was “departure; departing (from …); departing (at time …)​” [Definitions are coming from Jisho too.]

Was I wrong about this being a Coming Soon section? Was it a “Leaving Soon” section? I pushed on!

I used Jisho again for the last character and it means “to sell” which made sense in the context.

But here is where it all got trippy. So literally this string is saying Soon Departing Sell. But why would Nintendo be removing games from their store, that doesn’t make too much sense so early in the Switch’s life. So I dug a little further, and it turns out those two kanji characters together have a different meaning. 発売 = “sale; offering for sale; release (for sale); launch (product)​” If you think about “departing” and “releasing” you can kind of wrap your head around how these could be so similar. If you release something it departs from you, right?

Anyway so now we have confirmed what I initially suspected, that this says “Coming Soon” or I guess more technically “Releasing Soon.”

What I don’t know, though, is how I would have figured this out without the context of this being the Switch e-shop. If I’d just read it on a wall somewhere I would have translated it as something like “Won’t be on sale for much longer” which is pretty much the opposite of what it says.

I just find this all super fascinating. Will I ~ever~ be able to read/understand Japanese (I don’t even dream of being able to actually speak it)? Probably not. But just translating words is turning out to be one of the most interesting ‘puzzles’ I’ve encountered lately.

2017 Gaming Resolutions

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions but this year circumstances are kind of guiding my hand. 2017 is going to suck for us. First our lease is up in July and we’re going to have to move since they want to renovate the apartment. They’ve been going through the entire complex doing this, dislodging some residents who’ve lived here for decades, so while I’m not taking it personally, it’s a major inconvenience. I’m old enough that moving means hiring someone. My days of humping heavy furniture up and down stairs are behind me, and Angela is in even worse shape for that kind of thing. So moving is going to be both a headache and a big expense. In fact we’re going to start packing up some stuff as soon as the Christmas decorations come down just in case we find a new place before July and have to move in a hurry.

Money is going to be tight this year because of that, and because our health insurance is going through the roof. Between the two of us we’re paying about $800/month on health insurance now. Mine is through work and went up about $40/month this year, Angela’s is through the ironically titled Affordable Care Act, and it jumped $125 or so from 2016 to 2017. So now we need to cut $165/month from other areas. We’re going to cancel cable and that will cover about $75/month of it, but the rest will have to come from cutting down on fun stuff, including games. Of course the big wildcard in all this is: how much will our new rent be? We’re looking at moving to a town outside the Raleigh area to see if we can save that way, but we can’t go so far out that we don’t get decent Internet since I need that for my work. It seems like rents go up just outside the city and then start going down as you move further out into more rural areas.

So enough depressing myself, here’re my fairly un-specific gaming resolutions for 2017:

Play games longer — I’ve already started doing this. For years I’ve been a real ‘grazer’ when it comes to games. I buy a ton of them and play most of them for a short time, basically until the novelty wore off or until some new shiny caught my eye. I very rarely finished games. I’ve been changing that habit in 2016 though. I’m not only finishing more games but in some cases continuing to play past the end of the narrative. I’ve found that many games seem to have 3 stages: The shiny new game phase where you’re learning the major systems and everything is fun. Then the ‘mid-game’ phase that can feel a little rote (and that’s where I previously would bail). Then finally the “Expert” phase where you’ve played enough that you start picking up on subtleties that you missed earlier, or maybe enjoying aspects that you’d kind of overlooked… I’m finding it hard to quantify this, but I know that I’m finding my interest in games seems to start high, then fall, then ramps back up the more I play.

Buy fewer games at launch — I need to resist the hype surrounding new games and buy far fewer at launch. Not only will this save me money since prices drop so quickly, but these days many games improve in the months after launch as the developers fix bugs, tweak performance or add features. Since I virtually never play games twice it just makes sense to wait for these improvements before purchasing and playing a game. I’ll still get a few titles at launch: stuff that is primarily multiplayer for instance, since you want to be competitive and play when the community is most active. Also a few select titles that just feel special to me: Horizon: Zero Dawn for instance.

Blog when I have something to say — This is a bit of a tangent, but I just recently re-opened this blog and already I’m feeling a little like I’m in a rut, mostly because I’ve been trying for daily posts even when I’m not really feeling it. So in 2017 I’m going to cut back and just do posts when I have something I want to share

And that’s about it. Here’s hoping 2017 sucks less than I expect it to. But I doubt it will.

No Man’s Thursday: Space Poop

Posted on by Nimgimli

Once again nerdy noodling cut into my gaming time last night. This time it was creating a bootable USB stick with a Linux distro on it. Seems like it should be easy but it turns out there’s a lot of trial and error involved. Depending on the computer, the thumbdrive type and the distro you’re trying to use, I guess. All I know is I’ve created 4 different supposedly bootable thumbdrives so far. I don’t think any one of them works on all the systems I’ve tried it on.

I did feel pretty good about finally getting a “Live” Ubuntu thumbdrive to boot and using the included disk partitioning software (GpartEd) to resize the linux partition on my dev server. When I set that system up a few years ago I was just playing around with linux so only devoted 100 GBs of space to it. (Did I really just say “only” 100 GBs?) Now that I have clones of 7 or 8 of our sites running on it, plus lots of backups, I was out of space. Didn’t really want to wipe the drive so I was happy this worked out.

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu with the Unity desktop on my old Lenovo laptop. I don’t really like Unity and I thought I could just install whatever desktop I wanted, but after Googling around I’m getting mixed signals. Some people say its fine to replace the desktop (I was looking at Mate) and others say you’re better off re-installing after finding a distro that has the desktop you want baked in.

So I’m considering Option C, which is to just install Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop instead of Ubuntu. I run Mint on my dev server and it feels pretty comfortable to me, but some things work slightly differently than they do on standard Ubuntu. Since all our websites run on Ubuntu I feel like it would behoove me to get more used to the Ubuntu way of doing things. So we’ll see.

Anyway on to gaming.

I might be almost done blogging about No Man’s Sky. I’m still enjoying the game a lot but I’m not sure how to talk about what I’m working on without it sounding boring and NMS is such a magnet for haters…I don’t want to give them any ammo to attack the game with.

I started off last night talking to my employees. The armorer says he’s done everything he can do for me, which is a little disappointing, but the others are keeping me busy.

I need to find something called Rigogen in order to make Copper Wiring, which in turn I need to make Circuit Boards, which is something my Construction Expert is waiting for. I Googled Rigogen and apparently it is found underwater. Since I started searching for it I’ve only found one planet with water and it was pretty shallow. No Rigogen there. Huge ‘bubbles’ of Emeril filled with water though. I almost drowned in one of them!

What’s a little annoying is that I stumbled upon a moon with ample deposits of copper (and gold) but I can’t use that copper to make copper wiring. Silly videogame logic.

I need to go in search of more Condensium for non-ferrous plating, also for circuit boards. I know where to get that, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I need Coryzagen to make glass with. Haven’t really started looking for that yet.

My farm is coming along. I have a few ‘crops’ growing and two more I’m working on. One requires Albumen Pearls which are always fun to collect because whenever you take one, the local sentinels freak right out. Probably because these pearls are actually some kind of chrysalis for some kind of life form.

But what I spent a lot of time on last night was gathering Coprite. You get that from “overfed animals.” Yeah it’s space poop more or less. Pre-Foundation Update feeding an animal just resulted in it digging up small deposits of random materials. It was hardly worth it once the novelty of having a short-term animal friend wore off. But now if you feed them they make Coprite, which I basically needed as fertilizer for some crop the farmer wants. The other material I need for this crop comes from carcasses. Since I’m not a MONSTER I wasn’t about to start shooting the animals I’d just been feeding so I decided I’d collect this stuff from aggro animals.

I finished the night on a moon that had both aggressive sentinels and aggressive animals; I was attacked as soon as I jumped out of my ship. So next time I play I should finish gathering all that up.

Other than that it was business as usual. Learning new words, fighting pirates, scavenging. I found a derelict ship but since it only had one more ‘slot’ than my current ship I decided to skip it.

See? It all sounds really boring, but actually my gaming time flew by and I was sad when it was time to quit for the night. I do think one night a week is a nice frequency for NMS though; it feels fresh and fun every time I log in (and it gives Hello Games time to get the next update out before I leave the game behind).

My tech nightmare

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week I offended some ancient technology demi-god somehow, and I paid the price.

It all started Wednesday when folks were talking about LOTRO. I was wondering if my old characters still existed so I fired up Steam and installed the game. When it finished installing through Steam I fired it up and it did that thing where every damned Steam game seems to need to install C++ libraries and assorted other things. In this case ANCIENT versions. Then it had to patch. Then I let it download high-resolution textures.

When it was finally done I started the game, with the intention of literally taking a screen shot of my characters to share on Imzy. I had no intention of actually playing the game. LOTRO started, my primary monitor when black. Stayed black. I could hear sounds but they were broken and stuttering. So I jumped over to monitor #2 and right clicked LOTRO and picked Close Window and nothing happened. So I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and nothing happened. Task manager wouldn’t come up. Vexed, I held down the power button on the machine to kill it. And that’s when trouble really began.

When I restarted the machine it blue-screened with an error of BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO. Someone suggested this could be a video card issue, so I dragged the system out and swapped it with an old card I had. No help there. Swapped it back and started googling solutions. Tried various things for the next day or so. Some of them, like an extended chkdsk, took hours and hours to run. Tried to restore but Windows said it couldn’t find any restore points.

Finally found this solution online and it got me back to the desktop. Basically you’re replacing a bunch of files in C:\Windows\System32\config with backup copies.

So now I was at my desktop but my Start menu wouldn’t come up and everything felt really slow and sluggish. Virus maybe? Ran a bunch of checkers but found nothing. That was another few hours gone. Ever since installing LOTRO when the system starts up, about 20-30 seconds after I see a desktop, one of my monitors goes black for a few seconds. I see a ‘loading cursor’ and then the desktop appears, but with limited functionality (no Start menu, can’t open more than 1 file explorer window from the task bar, and some other stuff). I kind of feel like whatever this is, it’s undoing my fixes.

But at least I could get to my files. First thing I did was check to make sure my backups were up to date and…my backup system had quietly stopped working last June! Nothing since then was backed up. OK well I decided to back stuff up manually. Starting copying stuff to an external USB drive and it was going at like 18 Kbs and was going to take two days to copy, then it crapped out completely. USB was apparently out, but I could still copy across my home network to my Linux server. But first I had to clear out a bunch of stuff from that to make room.

I had to blow away a bunch of dev sites but freed up the space and starting copying my files to the Linux server. That was going to take a couple hours. 25% of the way through, I get an error that the PC can’t talk to Linux any more. I look at the Linux box and it was frozen. It has never done this, and had been running flawlessly for months. NOW it decides to crap out. So I reboot THAT and when I get it back online, the PC can no longer see it.

Interspersed with all of this I’m trying a bunch of things to repair the Windows installation but nothing is working. OK time to Reset the machine. By this time it’s about 4 pm Thursday. I start the reset process. It gets about 40% done and reboots to a black screen with a circle of dots indicating some process is happening. I let it sit like that for 7 hours. At about 11:30 I manually restart the machine and I get a “Loading Windows…” screen. Yay! I go to bed. In the morning I find that same black screen with the circle of dots. I reboot again and I get “Restoring files” and when that finishes I’m right back to where I started. The Reset failed.

At some point you start trying crazy shit. I read somewhere to unplug all USB devices. I do that and try the Reset again and it fails again. And for some reason when I re-attached the external USB drive I plug it into another USB port and… it works perfectly. So apparently one of my USB ports is blown. At least that means I can backup my files, so I do that. Now the pressure is off.

I try to reset or restore the system through a bunch of different techniques and none of them work. Half-way through this process, my main monitor stops working. Now to be fair this monitor has been a little wonky for a while. It would get stuck in standby mode and I’d have to cut the power to reset it. Now it’s frozen and won’t come back, but the thing is, it APPEARS to be working. So now I start to wonder how many times in the past days I’ve thought Windows was frozen but it’s just the monitor freezing. Anyway I crawl under the desk and disconnect that, and switch the backup monitor to the port that main monitor was using just to be sure it isn’t the video card connection.

So count so far: 1 fubar’d Windows OS, 1 fubar’d USB port, 1 fubar’d Linux service, 1 fubar’d monitor. All in the course of 3 days. AND my laptop has been acting up; the cursor keeps going nuts. Oh well.

Finally I just give in and install Windows from scratch. This works but I see a lot more partitions than I expect to see. There are 2 System Restore partitions, one that’s a few hundred megs, the other and about 3 GB. Then there’s another UEFI partition, if I recall correctly. Not being as up on Windows as I should be, I leave them all be. I hope I don’t regret that.

So now I’m re-installing apps and I’ve confirmed that my backup is actually running again. I ordered a new cheap monitor (money is tight right now or I would’ve just gone and bought a new system…this one is 6 years old) and a new video card because my Spidey Sense is telling me that my current card might have had something to do with this issue (sometimes when I start this machine it reports that the card’s supplementary power cable isn’t attached…in fact I replaced the power supply because of this not too long ago).

Hopefully it won’t take me too long to get everything back where it was. I’m going to have to re-create those dev sites on the Linux server, and I need to get all my tools re-installed on the PC and pull down all my work repos. And then the next thing I am not ever going to do is reinstall LOTRO! In fact I don’t think I’ll mess with installing games on the system again. I don’t play PC games and I just don’t need these kinds of headaches. Maybe games from the Windows Store since they are sandboxed and can’t bork your whole system.

Now I’m going to go give my game consoles a big ‘ol hug!

No posts cuz no gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I think I’m in one of those gaming funks that most of us fall into now and then. Most of this week I’ve spent doing daily crafting writs in The Elder Scrolls Online (I got my new XB1 character to 15 and we’re supposed to do a dungeon run on Monday and I didn’t want to get too far ahead of everyone else so haven’t been adventuring) and…that’s about it. I’ve popped into The Division and even Forza 6 a couple of times but neither is holding me.

Mostly this week I’ve been watching TV (the excellent PBS series Wolf Hall) or fiddling with a new laptop that my job sent me. I work from home and generally use my own gear, but a few idiots have been working from their virus-ridden home machines and uploading contaminated files to work data repositories, causing major headaches for IT. So new policy means I have to stop using my machine and use the machine they gave me. “Moving in” to that machine took a couple of days. Too much stuff!

I got to pick the machine I wanted, within reason, and decided on a 15″ HP Spectre x360. Since my co-workers use stupidly expensive Macs I was able to upgrade the x360 a bit, and got 16 GB of RAM and a dual core i7 processor. The IT Director threw in a stylus to use with it, too. Even with the upgrades, my machine was still cheaper than the Macs she usually has to buy. It doesn’t have discrete graphics so it is definitely not a gaming machine, but it doesn’t have to be for this purpose. The screen is really nice (though I didn’t ask for the 4K upgrade) and both touch and the trackpad work really well. I actually prefer it to my Surface 3, to be honest.

I’ve also been watching some videos from Microsoft’s Build conference, which has me kind of itching to build something.

I used to semi-panic when games started to hold no interest for me. They’ve been my primary hobby for so much of my life. But I’ve gone through this phase enough times now that I know that’s just what it is: a phase. In a few days or a few weeks I’ll be enjoying the heck out of games again.

But until then, the blog will probably be a bit quiet.

I’m too old to play (some) videogames

Posted on by Nimgimli

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: there’s no upside to getting old. I’m speaking from experience. In terms of ‘traditional’ video games I’m in what I imagine is a fairly small group: folks over 50 who still spend a lot of time with a controller in their hands. Old age means your eyesight starts to go wonky (I had 20-20 vision for most of my life, now I wear $500 progressive bifocals and I have to get them upgraded every few years), your joints start to hurt and your reflexes (both mental and physical) start to slow down.

A few months ago Rock Band 4 came out. I had a lot of fun playing Rock Band back when it was hot so I bought the game/guitar controller bundle for RB4 as soon as it came out. So far I’ve played it once. I have just enough arthritis in my hands that trying to play on that controller causes me a lot of joint pain in my fingers. That wasn’t a problem as recently as Rock Band 3 that came out in 2010. But once your body starts to degrade, things go downhill alarmingly quickly. If I played through the pain it might get better (I can use a traditional controller without any pain I think because I’m so used to it) but so far I haven’t wanted to play badly enough to endure the discomfort.

RB4 is just one game and its loss isn’t all that great, but this week I discovered an entire genre has been closed to me: side-scrolling platformers. Earlier this week I was going through my PS4 collection looking for games I felt good about removing from the hard drive, which is getting pretty full. I stumbled on Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, which I believe was a PS+ freebie a long time ago. Or maybe I bought it during a sale…who knows? In either case I had it installed but had never played it.

So I tried it, and it was super-fun for about 3-4 hours. But as is the case with most platformers, the farther in you go the more complex the moves you need to use to progress and soon enough I came to a section of the game that I just couldn’t get past. I knew WHAT I had to do, and if I was playing back when I was 45 I’m sure I could’ve cleared it without too much difficulty. But now? I just couldn’t keep my fingers moving fast enough for long enough to pass through this area. This passage had me doing that ping-pong wall jump routine that many platformers challenge you with, in order to move vertically up a shaft. The twist here is that 1 wall is in the “dead” world and 1 wall was in the “living” world so in addition to wall jumping back and forth I had to phase between worlds as well.

In mechanical terms, I had to tap X, then X again (a double jump with a brief pause to get enough height to make progress), then R2 to phase between the dead and the living world, and then push & hold the left stick left or right to stick to a wall. That sounds easy, right? And it was, but I had to do it smoothly about 6 times to get to the top of this passage. And time and again I’d do something stupid on repetition 4 or 5.

I spent about 10 minutes trying to get past this segment and decided maybe I needed to take a break (I’d been playing for a while). So I did and came back to it fresh and spent about 20 minutes and STILL didn’t get past it. At that point I gave up, and deleted the game from my PS4 (in part because I was trying to clear up space and in part so the icon wasn’t sitting on my dashboard mocking me).

It’s possible that had I kept trying I might have eventually gotten past this section, but the other thing about getting old is that you become more and more aware that you have a finite amount of time left to live. I know that sounds way dramatic and it’s not like you think in these terms, but it’s more like a background hum of “I don’t have the time to waste on this.” I mean video games are inherently a waste of time I guess, but at the same time I find they can be super-satisfying and often relaxing. But there are a LOT of games I want to play (with more coming all the time) so when it’s taking me too long to get to the next “rat pellet” (by which I mean some kind of dopamine producing happy moment) I move on to something new.

After I deleted Guacamelee! I went back to clearing out old games, and I found a few other platformers and realized that for the most part, I may as well delete them too. I’m not meaning to pick on Guacamelee! in this post. I don’t think it’s an unusually hard platformer. My issue is with the entire genre (specifically 2D side-scrolling platformers). With a limited palette of moves to work with, the only way for designers to ramp up the challenge as you move through the game is to either ask you to string together longer and longer combos of moves, or making the timing required more and more precise. Neither of those things is a good fit for an aging gamer who doesn’t have the mental and digit-al (digits like in fingers…get it?) dexterity that s/he once had.

Another genre I’ve given up on is competitive MP shooters that are played in small arenas, because again my brain-to-finger connection just isn’t fast enough to compete with younger gamers (games that offer more space to move around in tend to also reward tactics and sometimes I can still do OK in those).

I’m not sure what genre I’ll have to give up next and I hope I don’t find out for a while. But in broader terms as both the console gaming audience and the developers who make games age, I wonder if we’ll ever see a time where some games cater to older players. I read an interview with Cliff Bleszinski (I can’t remember where) in which he said that his next game is going to offer some kind of class or weapons meant for older gamers because he (and he is way younger than me) is already feeling that he can’t keep up with the youngsters who can snap off headshots without breaking a sweat. That was pretty encouraging to me and I hope more developers adopt a similar philosophy.

It won’t be easy though, because if a developer makes a game and puts in giant bright red sparkly letters across the box that the game is intended for gamers over 60, the 20-something internet blowhards will still rip it to shreds as being too easy and the game will end up with a 40 at Metacritic (in spite of the old gamers loving it) and the publisher will lay off the entire dev team. It’s why we can’t have nice things.

On the bright side, I only have 20 years or so left to worry about any of this.

A different kind of stress

Posted on by Nimgimli

As of today it’s been one week since I stopped writing for ITworld (last Tuesday in a marathon writing session I banged out 3 posts and scheduled them for the remainder of the week). This change has had quite an impact on me. I’ve caught myself laughing more, being silly more and just, in general, feeling less tense.

Except when I’m not. Basically I’ve traded time-pressure stress for financial stress. I’m not sure how it’s going to feel once that extra check stops coming in so I’ve been fretting about that. But the difference between time stress and money stress (for me at least) is that time stress is constant. I often spent most of my day stressing about what I’d write about next. There was always a new deadline coming. Even when I took time off from the day job, I had the blog to worry about.

Financial stress is actually more intense (because it’s nice to have a home to live in, for example) but I seem able to ‘put it away.’ There’s not much I can do minute-to-minute about money, but I could, in theory, always be writing or researching a blog post. I used to check my RSS reader at least 6-8 times every day in order to keep up, for example.

The end result, so far, is a happier, more relaxed me. I find myself doing the WEIRDEST things. Last night after dinner I sat and read the newspaper. And I mean an actual, made-of-ground-up-wood newspaper. We subscribed to the Sunday paper mostly for the coupons (see above re: financial stress) but I’m finding myself leafing through it and reading about stuff I’d never otherwise read.

In terms of gaming I’m enjoying time-gobbling activities like going for fast lap records in Drive Club. The blogging me never had the patience to drive lap after lap trying to shave a second off my time because it felt like I was wasting precious time. If a game activity didn’t offer constant in-your-face stimulus I would bail on it as too time-consuming. But now I have free time to do things. I no longer have to decide what one thing I’ll do in an evening, there’s time to do several things.

Overall it’s a pretty good feeling, and worth having to cut some corners financially in order to maintain it. As long as we’re safe and warm and can pay stuff like medical bills and buy new shoes every so often, I think I’ll stick to this one job idea. I kind of dig it.

Scientist vs Lawyer: How I’m going to try to be a better blogger

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A couple weeks ago I was watching Star Talk (Neil deGrasse Tyson’s show). His guest that night was Bill Clinton. One of the interesting points made (and forgive me, I don’t recall exactly who said what) is that we need more scientists in government, and fewer lawyers. (Lawyer is the most common pre-politics job in congress, apparently.)

The reasoning was that scientists based their views on evidence. They look at the evidence and then form a statement based on it. Lawyers, on the other hand, are trained to work backwards from a goal (e.g. this person is innocent/guilty) and present supporting evidence to bolster their goal and weaken opposing views. Evidence that doesn’t support their goal doesn’t get presented. Yes, this is a huge oversimplification and I don’t want to get into politics here, but it lodged in my brain.

Too often (when blogging) I act like a lawyer rather than a scientist. In other words (purely hypothetical example) I’ll think to myself “I should write a blog post about how the PS4 is a better media streamer than the Xbox One.” When I come up with the idea, I’m assuming it’s true. Then I start gathering data to support my assertion. If I find data that doesn’t support it, it’s really tempting to just kind of push that data aside.

A more scientist-y way to approach a blog post is to ask myself a question: “Which is the better media streamer, the PS4 or the Xbox One?” Then I’d go gather as much data as possible, determine the answer to the best of my abilities, and then write the post, possible changing the question to the answer at that point: “Here’s why the Xbox One is the better media streamer.”

I’m inherently stubborn so once I decide something is true it’s really hard for me to change my mind. That was touched on in the Star Talk episode too. Too often our society views changing our mind as a sign of weakness. (Remember they were talking about politicians.) If a politician says they’re pro-{insert any policy} and then new evidence is presented that causes the politician to change their mind and become anti-{insert that same policy here} then too often the politician is seen as weak, wishy-washy, or not fully committed. In science though (according to the folks on Star Talk!) being willing to change your opinion based on new evidence is seen as a positive thing.

Moving forward I’m going to try to embrace my inner scientist more. To start the posting process by asking a question and then letting the facts answer that question; to base my views on the evidence and data I have available; and finally to be willing to change my opinion based on new/changing evidence.

As a corollary, another thing I need to work on is saying “Thanks” when someone corrects me. Too often when I state something that is incorrect and someone corrects me, my first impulse is to dig for data or a way to spin things so I can still appear to be right. That’s my ego at work. The wiser course of action is 1) confirm that the correction itself is accurate and assuming it is 2) thank the person for making me a tiny bit smarter that day.

Reinvigorating the pursuit of mythical fire-lizard critters

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hey if you’re reading this, I want to thank you for being one of the 3 people…. oh wait, that one is a bot. OK I want to thank you for being one of the 2 people to still have Dragonchasers in your RSS feed.

For the past five and a half years (give or take) I’ve been writing a blog at ITworld called The TechnoFile. It’s been an amazing opportunity, but over time Dragonchasers really suffered because of it. For a few years I managed to keep both going, but eventually I started to run out of steam and got to the point where I just didn’t have it in me to write for this blog after finishing my work for that one. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know!

Anyway, this Friday my last post for The TechnoFile will run. Suddenly I’ll have a lot more time in the evenings (that was a side job…I do have a 9-5 full time gig as well) and I’ve been thinking maybe I should try to revive Dragonchasers.

I’m not 100% sure there’s still an audience for gaming-blogs being written by some schmo with no insider info; I kind of feel like social media may have replaced personal blogs. But what the hell, it’s worth a try. I do have a huge list of marketing and PR contacts at this point, though I’m not sure how long they’ll be interested in engaging with me as a solo act. I guess we’ll see.

Even without support, I can go back to rambling about the games I play and whatever else moves me. It’ll be nice to be able to write about anything I like rather than sticking to the (admittedly rather broad) ‘beat’ that I was assigned to at ITworld.

Anyway again, thanks for sticking around. Once posts start rolling out I might ask a favor; I might need some help getting word out and maybe boosting my audience to 4, or even 5 (!) people.