My Own Worst Enemy

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be one of those posts that is of more interest to my future self than to my current audience, so unless you’re really interested in how my mind works and how I excel at self-sabotage, you might want to read something more interesting! Like the phone book. If phone books were still a thing.

Anyway, I’ve been REALLY enjoying Guild Wars 2 for the past month or so. I’d started a new character and had been leveling her up and doing the basic “My Story” questline, while learning how to play the game. It had been going really well and I’d been looking forward to that part of the day when I could sit down and play, and I NEVER felt like I had as much time to play as I wanted. Last night was no exception. I couldn’t wait to log in!

Then, like a light switch being thrown, everything changed. I was playing through the story quests and realized I was feeling bored and started feeling the itch to play something else. It was the eve of a new expansion launch when a lot of folks in my circles were back to being hyped about Guild Wars 2. So why was I suddenly not? So me being me, I turned my gaze inward and tried to figure out why.

First theory was just me being contrary. Everyone else liked GW2 so I was going to not like it. I discarded this theory pretty quickly because the hype around the expansion wasn’t at the kind of levels that would trigger that reaction, and I’ve more or less grown out of that mentality anyway. Y’know the “I liked them before they were popular, so now that they are popular I’ll go find something else to like” mindset. We invented that mindset in record stores in the late 60s and early 70s, I think.

Second theory was the lack of dopamine. I’d hit the level cap of 80. For a good while I was pretty sure this was the issue. I LOVE leveling characters and that rush when you get that level up DING! That part of the GW2 journey was over for me. But the more I thought about it, the less I thought this was what was bothering me, for two reasons. First is that I’ve been playing a LOT of Fallout 76 way, way after hitting the level cap of 50 and I really think FO76 has taught me to love the end game. Plus, as in FO76, you do keep earning experience in Guild Wars 2 after 80, it just isn’t used for levels any more. But I hadn’t really been filling the experience bar anyway so even if the level cap had been 90, nothing really would have been different.

So finally I came up with theory number three, and its the one I’m sticking with. I wasn’t pacing myself and the game wasn’t pacing me. In case you’ve never played, in vanilla Guild Wars 2 your story quests unlock based on your level. So you get the first part at level 10, the next part at level 20, and so on. Between those unlocks you have to go out and do random things to earn levels to get to where you unlock the next quest. That forces you to vary your gameplay. Once I hit 80 there was nothing forcing me to mix things up and I was just going from story quest to story quest and doing nothing else. I was determined to finish it and I felt like the ending was close, so I was going to focus 100% on these quests. And THAT was my mistake and what ‘broke’ the game for me.

It’s not that the story quests are bad or anything, but variety is what tends to keep me interested in things. I didn’t stop to go do crafting, or to go explore new regions. Prior to level 80 I was making it a point to walk from place to place just to see what adventures and events I’d come across. Now I was teleporting, as much as possible, to the next story quest marker as efficiently as possible. I was making a point of going AROUND events rather than jumping in! And THAT was why I was getting bored.

What I need to do is stop trying to rush the story and just mix things up and enjoy ALL that the game has to offer. I’m pretty sure if I do that, the fun will return. There’s a ton of things to do in this game and to focus on just one is frankly kind of silly. So yeah, I gotta mix things up, relax and enjoy the journey. And also figure out how to get better gear. I kind of thought that would be from doing the story but so far that hasn’t been the case. But that’s a whole other topic. One that I’ve now watched YouTube videos about!

Tonight’s gaming time will probably be occupied by watching a replay of Gamescom Opening Night since my silly job expects me to work and attend meetings while that show is live. So that might be a nice break, and tomorrow, I hope, I can return to Guild Wars 2 refreshed and with a new outlook. I’m going back to exploring and taking part in open world events and slowing down on the story quests.

See? Told you it was going to be a boring post!

You Don’t Have to Build Your Gaming PC

Posted on by Nimgimli

As I’ve mentioned more than a couple times, a month ago I bought a gaming PC. I didn’t have a ton of cash to spend; my budget was $2000. I mean as a console gamer, $2000 sounds like a crazy amount, but I have friends who’ve spent close to twice that on a gaming PC.

I am loving it so far. I did not build it, and I didn’t even go to a ‘builder’ place. I bought an off the shelf system from CyberpowerPC and I bought it from Amazon. I did make sure to buy a system and a brand that I knew used standard parts rather than OEM stuff so that I’d be able to upgrade it without any issues. Specifically I followed the advice of PC Builder Jason, who is a bit over-the-top but seems to offer good advice.

I made a point of waiting over a month to talk about the PC so when someone inevitably comes along and says CyberPowerPC is crap, or that PC Builder Jason gives terrible advice, I can with confidence say “I love this system and I’ve had no issues with it.” It got delivered, I took it out of the box, plugged it in and off I went. No hassles at all *knock on wood*. (OK I have one tiny issue in that all the RGB lights in it are too bright and there’s no way to dim them that I can find, at least without cracking open the case and connecting the lights to the motherboard. As shipped there are just physical buttons on the case that let you toggle between modes and hues, but not brightness.)

But to get to the point of this post, I think in some circles there’s a bit of elitism in PC gaming, and I wonder how many console gamers don’t make the jump not because of money, but because they don’t know enough about PCs. They see posts on social media or the gaming sites about how you have to build your own PC to get what you want, or to get a good deal, or to get quality, or to prove that you are a Real Gamer, and building your own seems too intimidating. To be sure over on the console side of things there’s a totally different argument but it is about PS5 is better than Xbox is better than Switch is better than PS5. Console wars never die, but once you own a system no one is going to give you crap because you don’t have extra storage space or a $200 controller or whatever.

I used to build PCs. Heck once upon a time I built PCs for doctor’s offices for a medical electronics company; that was my job. This was WAY back, like 1990 or maybe even earlier. (We sold a heart monitor that hooked up to a PC and back then many doctor’s offices didn’t have a PC so they’d buy heart monitor and PC as a bundle.) So I know I can do it (or at least that I could do it then, and it was a lot harder back then) but I just don’t want to do it. And I get really anxious spending all that money and worrying that I’m going to break something or screw something and winding up with a $2000 door stop. I know intellectually that is very unlikely to happen, but it still stresses me out.

I admit part of my resistance to getting back into PC gaming was the whole “PC Master Race” mentality that you run into on reddit or game forums, and the whole vibe that anyone who didn’t build their own PC was an idiot. Consoles are easy and gaming is a leisure activity. I don’t want gaming to be a source of stress. I also hadn’t realized just how far pre-made systems have come. I was used to the days when getting a desktop gaming system meant buying a powerful office system, a better GPU and a more powerful power supply and doing a Day 1 upgrade. That was what was in my mind. If I’d known I could have a fast, quiet system that I could just take out of a box and plug in, I might have come back to PC gaming a lot sooner.

Anyway, on the off chance that anyone who is curious about getting into PC gaming reads this, ignore all the elitism in the PC gaming space. I am NOT saying you shouldn’t build your own system if that is what you want to do. I’m sure it is very rewarding to do so. But I’m saying if you are not interested in that aspect of being a PC gamer, don’t let it hold you back. You most certainly can have a fine time with a good system bought from a big box store. Then if you want to, you can learn at your own pace. Maybe do an upgrade or two and if you really WANT to, you can build your own system 5 or 10 years down the road, ideally before you have a pressing need so you can take your time to build thoughtfully. I have pulled a complete 180 from “I like console, PCs are too much of a hassle” to “I love my PC so much! (Though I still love my consoles. too!)

Note: Header image generated by Bing Image Creator using prompt “image of a pile of computer parts”

Guild Wars 2: My First World Boss!

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK I’m pretty sure the title is a lie. It’s more than likely that WAY back at launch I took part in a world boss battle, but I have no recollection of doing so. Also, this is kind of a thrown together lazy Sunday post, so apologies for that.

The other morning I was in-game, doing hearts and working on “My Story” when a call went out that a World Boss group was forming for an event that took place in an hour. AN HOUR? I ignored it because that was forever away. But I was still playing when the call went out that it was happening in 15 minutes so I started move towards the “Commander” making the call.

You can join a Squad just by clicking on a Commander (which is another player who… I dunno how they become a Commander, but it’s presumably an experienced player). So I joined their squad. No idea how many players can join a squad but it seemed, y’know, raid-sized.

Staying safely back from the world boss
I’m just taking it all in…

I was a total fish out of water. Another player helpfully suggested I use a ranged weapon (I’m playing a Warrior) but I didn’t have one, so I hung back and mostly helped to res fallen fighters and to clear out the riff raff mobs on the perimeter.

Want to know what world boss it was? I have no idea! Want to know what zone it was in? I don’t even know that. I was just in my own little world when the call went out. I never really know where I am in Guild Wars 2, just always working my way towards that green asterisk thingie that indicates the next step in your story quest. I have find that going from one to the next on foot rather than teleport, and doing hearts and stuff along the way, has kept me pretty closed to leveled up enough to just keep rolling along, but I pay NO attention to where I am.

Oh wait, I took screenshots! It was Tequatl the Sunless!

Screenshot showing a sea of people fighting the boss
Look at them all! We’re a horde! {click to embiggen]

I’m not sure I did any damage to the actual boss. At the end was a chest that looked like a trophy and I couldn’t seem to interact with it (image at the top of the post is of the chest, quite elaborate, no?), but what made the whole thing fun was seeing so many more advanced players in all their shiny armor and fancy mounts and stuff. It was a real spectacle and very aspirational. I can’t wait to keep moving through the game, learning new stuff, exploring new areas… I’m pretty jazzed about Guild Wars 2 now!

More crowd shots from the world boss fight. I have no idea what is happening
Like I have NO CLUE what is going on, but I’m having fun!

The Worst Game I’ve Played in Recent History

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m always trying to earn Microsoft Rewards points because they are how I pay for Xbox Game Pass. One of the ways to do that is to earn an Achievement from an Xbox Game Pass title every day. A lot of the time I do this by using a guide for some game I’m not otherwise going to play (the YouTube channel Rewards Hunter is great for this) or I boot up a game that is leaving Game Pass soon just to get a couple of easy cheevos before said game leaves the service.

The other day I was looking for another game to check out. The “Leaving Soon” games have left for this month and the next round hasn’t been announced, and I wasn’t in the mood to follow a guide, so I looked at what I had installed, sorted the list by size (since my drives are almost full) and found Atomic Heart, a game that I had installed at some point. Figured I’d grab some cheevos then uninstall it.

Good lord is this ever a terrible game. The premise is that Russia won WW II and advanced technologically way faster than it did in real life. So now they have floating cities and a robotic work force and your goal is… well I have no idea what your goal really is.

You play P-3, who despite the name is human. He has got to be one of the most obnoxious and unlikeable characters I can ever remember playing as. He just constantly talks shit to everyone he comes in proximity to. I immediately hated this character and kind of hoped he’d get killed and then you would play as the REAL main character. No such luck, I guess.

The game starts at a glacial pace. I’m assuming someone was inspired by Half Life 2. First you are riding a boat, a passive passenger. Then you get out and run along the canal you were traveling down. Just running from point A t B. You follow way points. Then you get on an elevator and ride that down into some subterranean area, and that takes like, Mass Effect amounts of time. When you get down there, some hyper sexualized robot gives you a key. Just hands it to you. Then you have to ride THE SAME ELEVATOR BACK UP and it takes just as long. The key starts a car which you might THINK you’re going to drive but nope. Instead a robot lifts it into the air and you sit there again while you slowly traverse the world while you get a tour-guide narration of things to look at. The image at the top of this post is from that ride. I’m being unkind because of course it isn’t all like that but it was like that for a while as we flew through clouds. Anyway all of this takes, not exaggerating as I noted the time, about 20 minutes. Then finally you can start to play.

Game play is OK I guess. You start with an axe and a shotgun, but few shells for the latter. You meet an old lady named Grannie Dina (?) who inexplicably speaks with a British accent (again, you are in Russia). She blasts something out of the sky with a rocket launcher while you watch, then it’s ANOTHER elevator ride. Finally you smash up robots for a few minutes and think “OK maybe the game is finally getting going” then you are introduced to the upgrade system which takes the form on an AI in a vending machine and this is when things just go horribly, awfully wrong.

The AI, which goes by Nora and has a female voice, is just awful. Every line she speaks has some kind of sexual innuendo about as subtle as a sledgehammer blow. I took some screenshots so I could get some of these quotes completely accurate (I was upgrading a weapon while she was saying all of this):

“How titillating! Rebellious, dominant men really turn me on!”

“But I can do so much more! A quick romp with your axe is just a taste of things to come, you handsome beast!”

“Use this powerful weapon to split the skulls of your enemies and bring me gifts so we can get down and dirty. I’ll show you what real smut feels like!”

At some point she says something about how I should plunge my axe deep inside her, but I didn’t capture that. Meanwhile my character is talking about her being a ‘crazy bitch’ or something along those lines.

Screenshot of the Nora AI saying dirty things

While I was playing this @partpurple came in and just shook her head and said “Clearly this game was made for 12 year old boys.” I hoped the earth would open up and swallow me. Later she declared this to be the worst dialog she has ever heard, anywhere.

Finally I got free of Nora and her upgrades and moved on. Then I found a recording where some posh sounding man was complaining about the behavior of the robots (which, remember, are the labor force in this world), saying something along the lines of ‘The white ones are OK but the black ones really have an attitude’ and that they need to know their place. Those aren’t direct quotes because they were audio only, but that was the level of racism being conveyed.

It was at that point I quit and uninstalled the game. Maybe this was all a setup to make you hate the people (and AI’s) of the world. If so it worked, but it worked enough that I have no desire to be a part of this experience. I actually could’ve dealt with the pervy stuff (though probably would not have played when @partpurple was around) but the racist stuff was just too much. I actually spent some time on Google to see if anyone else had this reaction. It seems not, but I was reminded that the developers had to apologize for including racist caricatures from an old Soviet cartoon.

As well, it felt kind of ick playing a game that glorfied Russia, given the on-going war in Ukraine. I’ll give the devs the benefit of the doubt that the game was conceived and started before the war broke out.

Bottom line though, if for some reason you were thinking of playing this mostly forgotten title, I would suggest not doing so.

Being a Newb And A Veteran At The Same Time Is Weird

Posted on by Nimgimli

Remember when I said I was done posting about Fallout 76? I officially retract that!!

So as mentioned, I’ve started playing Fallout 76 on Steam. Since Bethesda doesn’t offer any kind of cross-play or cross-progression, that meant starting over. These days you can start at level 20, which I did, but really the first 50 levels of Fallout is newbie-ville. I hit 30 last night. I don’t really have a build, I’m constantly low on ammo, I have no mutations, and I haven’t even really picked a weapon type to focus on yet. I use whatever I happen to have ammo for. Taking down a non-trivial enemy can take 3 or 4 reloads of a weapon.

But I haven’t stopped my Xbox Fallout 76 character. There I have a build that is very solid. I have quality gear, a ton of mutations (including marsupial that lets you jump really high) and more ammo than I know what to do with. Only the toughest enemies take more than 1 full clip of my railway rifle and many things get 1-shotted, though the railway fires so fast I usually waste a couple of rounds. On Xbox I’m level 320 or somewhere around there.

Currently there’s a two week campaign running where at the top of every hour there is a Mothman event at Pleasant Valley (where the legend of the Mothman first arose, apparently). The bulk of this event is guarding 3 pyres from enraged cultists. On the Xbox I generally pick a pyre and defend it easily. In fact other players just kind of get in my way. I find the event rather boring really, as there is zero challenge to it. (But. y’know, LOOT!) After the pyres are defended you have to get up to a rooftop to commune with the Mothman, which I do via just jumping a couple of times thanks to the marsupial super jump.

So after doing that, I log off the Xbox and log onto Steam and an hour later the event happens again and I fast travel to it and OMG it is SO hard! I basically have to be carried. The enraged cultists can kill me pretty quick, half the time I run out of ammo, and when I don’t it takes me so long to kill 1 cultist that 2 or 3 others in the same wave will have done serious damage to the pyre. I absolutely need help. Heck I even struggle in the preliminary part of the event where you’re killing deer and regular cultists. Then when the pyres have been defended and it is time to get up on the roof? I have to follow a bunch of ramps and stairs to get there and often, since I’m always encumbered, I don’t get there in time to commune with Wise Mothman! So sad. At least I still get the “Event Completed” but I don’t get the Mothman’s buff.

Going from one experience pretty nearly directly to the other just feels so entirely weird. I realize in a lot of ways you’d have the same experience just playing an alt, but playing Fallout 76 on the console feels different from playing on the PC, too. Plus on console I use a controller and on PC mouse and keyboard. So even things like the muscle memory I have from Xbox don’t really translate to the Steam version. It’s like a different game, only it’s the same. LOL

Honestly I find being the struggling newbie on Steam is more fun. I think part of the reason I’ve somewhat drifted away from the Xbox version of the game is I just get bored. I have a ton of quests to do but the combat in them is so easy that they all start to feel like fetch quests. Only when someone drops a nuke and an end-game boss comes out to play do things get really interesting. It was a hoot being really powerful for a while, but eventually you start to miss that challenge, y’know?

At QuakeCon there was a Fallout 76 panel and they did mention that they are aware that there is not enough difficult content in the game and they heavily implied that more will be added, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then I’ll keep being the newbie on Steam, getting underfoot and in the way of the old pros who could probably solo the event without too much difficulty!

A Curious Little Fallout 76 Movement Bug

Posted on by Nimgimli

While I never signed up or declared my intention to take part in Blaugust, on August 1st I got some FOMO and wrote a post. Then another on the 2nd, and another after that and here we are half-way through the month and I’ve kept it up. But my batteries are running down, mostly because half my team at work is on leave or vacation just as the summer lull is ending and projects are starting to heat up. One team member comes back next Tuesday so I THINK if I can get through to then, I might make the full month, but this week has been tough. (Plus GamesCom is next week which should provide plenty of blog fodder.)

All of which is a preamble to a short little post about a curious bug I ran into in the PC/Steam version of Fallout 76. Yes, now I’m playing Fallout 76 on Steam…did I mention that here? First I was going to play it on GeForce Now but then I got hooked (again!) and decided to install it locally.

So I was having a great time of it for a while, then suddenly I lost the ability to move. I was playing with a controller and at first thought it was a controller bug. I would turn and look around a bit and then suddenly I’d start moving again. I figured that was my cue to get used to playing with mouse and keyboard. But the same thing happened even after I’d set the controller aside. It hadn’t happened when I was playing on GeForce Now, though. And I noticed it seemed to happen more when I was in a building than when I was outside. I had installed a mod that was supposed to improve wide-screen support, so I disabled that (honestly I didn’t notice much different anyway…but FO76 could really improve its wide screen support). That didn’t fix the bug. But through continued messing with it I discovered that it mostly happened when I looked down to loot a body, and looking up at the sky would often fix it.

Screenshot of the fallout76prefs.ini file
If you’re playing the Xbox Windows version of Fallout 76, look in Project76Prefs.ini instead

To keep a short post short, it turns out it was a framerate issue. When I looked down at the ground, or when I was inside an enclosed area, the framerate went so high the that game just seemed to freak out and couldn’t keep up or something. THAT was when I remembered that I’d followed YouTuber AngryTurtle’s advice to change a setting in the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. The specific setting was iPresentInterval=1 which we were told to set to iPresentInterval=0 to make the game run much better. Which in fact it does…it apparently turns off the FPS cap and the game’s built in VSYNC. But it maybe does TOO good a job?

The solution is either to just turn that back to 1, or to use the Nvidia control panel to cap the framerate. I did the latter, setting max framerate to 144 fps which is what my monitor runs at. I had a bit of screen tearing when I looked down and ran, so I also turned on Nvidia Vsync. That fixed the issue for me.

It was just such a weird bug that rather than annoy me, I found it kind of amusing and fascinating (OK I mostly felt that way AFTER I solved it). If any devs wander by I’d love to hear a theory as to why too high a framerate would make a game engine just sit down and cry like this!

Screenshot of my nvidia control panel settings for fallout76.exe

An Ode to GeForce Now

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple months before I broke down and bought a new gaming PC, I’d resubscribed to GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service. I’m sure if you’re reading this blog you know what cloud gaming is all about so I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, but suffice to say I’m kind of a fan of it. I know “REAL gamers” poo-poo it because of lag or whatever, but despite how much time I spend playing games, I’m not super serious about them in terms of being competitive. In addition to that, my old man reflexes are slow enough that any lag introduced by streaming is insignificant compared to the lag between my eyes, brain and fingers! I’d love to sit some of these young gamers down in front of an OnLive session, if they want to experience True Lag! (That post is actually pretty positive because for 2010, OnLive worked pretty well, but nothing like the game streaming services we have today.)

For me, and this is SUPER subjective and depends on where you are physically and what ISP you use, GeForce Now works best of the various cloud gaming services I’ve tried (though Stadia, may it rest in peace, was even better), though it certainly isn’t the cheapest. If you have a 4K or widescreen monitor you’re going to want the “Ultimate” service which is $20/month or $100/6 months. I’d done the latter and after buying the new PC I thought “Well that was a wasted $100.”

But it turns out, no it wasn’t. My new PC only has 2 TB of storage (can’t believe we live in a time where I’m griping about “only” having 2 TB) and games are HUGE these days. I’ve found GeForce Now has transitioned from “the service that makes up for your weak-ass graphics card” to “the service that makes up for your miniscule storage space.” What I’ve been doing is installing the games I am playing regularly on my local machine, but games I just dip into once in a while, I play via GeForce Now. For example in in a post a few days ago I was musing about whether I’d make the switch from Fallout 76 Xbox to Fallout 76 PC. Eventually I decided to jump into the PC version, but rather than hassling with installing it, I played on GeForce Now. I’m not sure how big the Fallout 76 install is on PC, but on the Xbox it’s over 100 GB and that’s too much of my precious storage space to devote to a game I might play once every couple of weeks!

Of course expanding my storage space is a lot cheaper than upgrading a graphics card (an additional 2 TB drive is about $150 currently) so in the long term I might just do that, assuming my new motherboard makes that easy. Once my 6 month sub runs out I MIGHT do that, but I have to admit I really like the convenience of having 320 games “installed” on GeForce Now and ready to play on a whim. $16.67/month (the cost of Ultimate if you but in 6 month chunks) isn’t cheap, but it’s less than, say, my Netflix subscription. And as time goes on and my shiny new GPU turns into a ‘good but not great’ GPU while the GeForce Now GPUs get upgraded, it might make sense to play MORE games on GeForce Now.

Oh and I almost forgot that you can play your GeForce Now titles basically on anything with a browser, and in particular for me I have an Nivdia Shield streaming box so can easily play on the TV. Are my consoles obsolete!!?

I guess for now I’m taking a wait-and-see position. There are of course disadvantages to playing on the cloud. While lag is a non-issue for me, not having access to mods could be one. Even minor things you might tweak, like manual updates to an .ini file, are either not available or require jumping through hoops every time you play on GeForce Now. So it isn’t perfect. (Probably worth mentioning that Shadow PC is an option if you want a full cloud PC experience including mods, but that will cost you $35/month for a system with only a half TB of storage and a 3070TI card.)

Oh, and before closing I should note that they offer a free tier (but you often have to wait in a queue to get in so if you’re going to use it regularly you’ll probably want to pay), and they also offer “Day Passes” which are a great way to test the paid tiers without spending too much money. Last, at the time of posting they’re offering 50% off the paid tiers which makes them a great deal, though sadly there is no way to “stack” memberships so I can’t take advantage of the deal. 🙁

Tonight We’re Going to Peripheral Like It’s 1999

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not a dad but that doesn’t mean I can’t make dad jokes.

Back in the days of yore, say 1999 just to riff off the song, Logitech was pretty much THE PC peripheral brand, at least in my circles. Microsoft took a shot at going after Logitech and had some success for a while, and they still do make mice and keyboards, but I have to admit I had to go check Amazon to see if that was even that case. Logitech was king.

Times change and particularly in the world of gaming, new brands came along. Razer, Corsair, Redragon and Steel Series come to mind. A couple years back (2019) I decided to be like the cool PC gamers and invested in a Steelseries RBG keyboard and mouse, the former being a mechanical keyboard that feels OK but is pretty noisy. I think I went with Steelseries because the gaming laptop I had at the time had a Steelseries keyboard built in. I can’t remember for sure.

Anyway after about, I dunno, a day of using these peripherals I pretty much forgot about them. The mouse was a mouse. The keyboard made letters appear.

Except every peripheral brand has to have its own software to go with it, and the Steelseries software has caused a certain amount of trouble for me. An update of it completely broke my laptop keyboard and after I got it rolled back I had to be careful to never let it update. On my new machine it has helpfully installed a bunch of virtual audio devices for some reason. I’m 99% sure this was operator error and I installed something I shouldn’t have, and they don’t seem to cause any issues but it’s annoying having them there (none of them seem to do anything).

Screenshot of my sound settings showing lots of extra virtual devices
So many devices! I just want to hear the lamentations of my enemy’s women!

But hey, I roll with stuff like this because I’m lazy.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a ton of issues getting a microphone to work with both my last PC and my current one. I’ve been working from home long enough, and being on Zoom and Teams meetings enough, that I now feel pretty comfortable chatting with people (my work machine has no issues with the headset attached to it). I kind of thought, who knows? Maybe I can talk to other gamers? Eventually I bought a cheap USB “gaming headset” and eureka, the mike worked. The sound was OK for gaming, but not for music, so I ended up having 2 different headsets hanging off the machine, one for music and one for gaming. Except, again, lazy, so I rarely switched to the gaming headset with the working mike.

A few nights back I decided to give this voice thing another go. Put on the gaming headset which clamped onto my head like I’d stuck it in an alligator’s mouth. I have a big fat head and a lot of stuff doesn’t fit well (one-size-fits-all caps? they don’t fit this noggin). I took the headset off and tried to gently bend it open a bit and SNAP! It broke in half. I guess that’s what you get for $20

Undeterred and embracing the idea that a gaming PC is just a black hole that sucks up money, I headed to Amazon and picked out a better headset, and I thought back to the olden days and decided to go with Logitech. Specifically the Logitech G Pro X SE. It arrived the next morning (how does Amazon manage that?) and it is fantastic. It is comfortable, the sound is really decent, and the mike works perfectly as far as I can tell (haven’t actually talked to anyone cuz no friends). But of course, new brand of peripheral means new software, in this case the Logitech G-Hub software. But this software seems pretty slick. It even has an equalizer that comes with presets, and other owners with more time and confidence than me can upload theirs as well. Took me just a few minutes to find something that sounded good to me. It I was a REAL real gamer I’d swap to one profile for music and another for gaming. Oh also it is a surround sound headset; I have no idea how the physics work to create surround sound in a headset but damned if it doesn’t work really well. I nearly jumped out of my skin the first time I heard an NPC say something from right “behind” me.

Anyway while all THIS was happening, I was also looking to use more custom buttons on my mouse for PC gaming. This Steelseries mouse has 4 extra buttons, 2 on either side, but the two on the outside, which I guess you’re supposed to hit with your ring finger, are really hard for me to use. And anyway I wanted MORE! MORE BUTTONS PLEASE! And by now I was on a spending roll, so back to Amazon I go and order a Logitech gaming mouse, the G502 X Wired mouse that has I think 13 buttons altogether? More than I need, anyway. This thing is SO light it feels fake. Like an empty shell. And it feels really good in my hand. Early days but I think I’m going to really like it. It has no RGB on it though so… fail? (Kidding, I really do not care about lights on my mouse.) I assume no RGB because it isn’t wireless. I believe the wireless model of the same mouse does have a light strip.

Screenshot of the Ghub software
The family is all together. How cozy!

And just so I could get rid of the Steelseries software, I bought a Logitech Keyboard, too. (The G915 TKL Wireless with “Tactile” mechanical keyboard.) They make a few versions of this keyboard, all mechanical but with different levels of clickiness. This one is pretty quiet which I really appreciate. ( @partpurple doesn’t believe it is mechanical because it doesn’t make a racket.) I bought the wireless version mostly because it was what I could get fast. I just wanted media keys and a backlight and a good typing experience — the keyboard does have RGB and you can program the colors through the Ghub software or through Windows 11’s Dynamic Lighting system. I’m pretty happy with a solid backlight color. I am so boring. The keyboard is going to take a little bit of getting used to but it really hits the sweet spot of feeling good without being loud. My ONE gripe with it is that the symbols on the number keys (#,$,%,^, etc) are not backlit. After 50 years of typing you’d think I would know where they are, but…I don’t. LOL

So now you get the dumb title of this post. I am back where I started, using all Logitech peripherals. They may not be what the cool kids use, but I’m really happy with all three of them so far. Granted it is early days, so if some weird issue crops up I’ll be sure to share.

Now I just need a new chair, and maybe a new desk, and then… just maybe, I can stop spending money on returning to PC gaming! Though you know, my widescreen monitor is only 1440P. 4K widescreen OLED monitor, maybe?!

Rent-A-Girlfriend

Posted on by Nimgimli

A while back I was looking for a new anime to watch. I have a pretty large Watch List on Crunchyroll because I add things on a whim, but I tend to use the old Last In, First Out methodology. So I’m always watching stuff I just recently added and shows further back in the list get forgotten. This time around I decided to go the END of my Watch List and pick something.

I’ve been “learning” Japanese on Duolingo for about 10 months now, and I find watching anime helps keep me motivated to stick with that. After 315 days of learning, I know almost NO Japanese. I’m still learning to parse the language; it is still a challenge for me to figure out where one word ends and the next begins. Learning what the words actually mean is a whole ‘nother level of difficulty! Of course in anime characters tend to speak even faster than they do in my Duolingo lessons but I still feel like, on some subconscious level, watching anime is helping me. Or maybe I’m just justifying sitting around watching TV. But when I DO pick out a word or phrase, I get pretty excited. The other day, for the first time, I caught a change between the spoken dialog and written. The spoken referred to someone playing a game with their younger sister while the sub-title said they were playing with a friend. I was ecstatic! LOL

And just to complete the circle, I got the idea that I wanted to learn Japanese decades ago with the goal being able to play Japanese video games and watch anime that hadn’t been translated. Back then there was a lot less translating stuff to English, at least officially. Of course today everything gets translated but I still had a hankering to learn it, plus I’ve heard learning a new language is good for staving off old-man-brain so finally, almost a year ago, I got started.

Anyway, way off topic. So I scrolled to the end of my watch list and just past the series I’ve completed was Rent-A-Girlfriend. I have no recollection of how it got added as it definitely isn’t in my normal wheelhouse. I was honestly a little hesitant because I was worried it was some kind of soft core hentai. (I’m sure there’s a word for soft core hentai but I don’t know what it is.) But it wasn’t. Mostly.

I don’t know if renting girlfriends is a real thing in Japan. I’m guessing it is. The idea (based on this anime at least) is that you’re basically hiring someone to be your date for the day. I guess we’d call them escorts. But the dates are just that: dates. No fooling around after. No going home with anyone. It’s a way to pay to have some charming company for an afternoon or evening. At least that’s what I gathered from this show. Could be a complete fabrication, I haven’t done the research.

Anyway, when the series starts out, 20-something college student Kazuya has been dumped by his first real girlfriend. To cheer himself up he rents Mizuhara who of course is beautiful, intelligent and classy. At the end of the date she holds his hand and he thinks she has fallen for him. Then he looks up her profile and all her other dates are sharing how great it was that she held their hand at the end of the date. Kazuya gets mad and gives her a bad review. But of course he rents her again. Through a series of hijinks, both of the fake-couple’s families meet the pair and assume they are actual boyfriend and girlfriend, and from there they keep up the facade so as not to disappoint anyone.

To make matters worse, it turns out the two go to the same school. And just to stretch credibility even further.. it turns out they are next door neighbors! What are the odds? “Off the clock” Mizuhara is very different from “girlfriend” Mizuhara and Kazuya likes the real her even better, it seems. By now they’ve gone on so many dates there’s a whole bunch of people who think they’re a real couple and they struggle to keep their secret. This leads to more women entering the scene. The ex gets jealous, they encounter another rental girlfriend who falls for Kazuya and blackmails him into dating her, and a few more are picked up along the way. I guess this is why it is tagged as a “Harem” show but really he for the most part (he IS still a horny 20-something) just has eyes for Mizuhara.

I really enjoyed this one. It was often funny, it was often sweet. At times it was a little sad, and yes, at times it was a little dirty. Most of the dirty stuff happens in Kazuya’s imagination and as someone who once upon a time was a 20 year old ruled by his hormones, I could relate to a lot of his thoughts, and so I found them funny. For example he’ll accidentally get a glance down a character’s blouse and he’ll quickly look away while in his head he’ll be screaming at himself because he can’t get an imagined naked image of her out of his mind. It never goes too far though and outwardly he is a gentleman. Just like I always was as I suddenly found a cloud or something super fascinating while the little devil on my shoulder urged me to sneak another peek.

The biggest issue I had was that Kazuya is so much his own worst enemy. He is always over-thinking things and that leads him to always say or do the absolute worst thing. I’d get frustrated with him fairly often, though I dunno, maybe that is part of why the show hooked me: “Will he EVER learn?” 🙂

There are currently three seasons and I’ve read there’s another coming next year. So, spoiler, there is no resolution by the end of season 3. But I found I was really rooting for the couple to get together. Maybe they will in season 4.

So yeah, no longer will I turn my nose up at anime labeled Romance, Harem, Shonen. Shonen in particular I generally avoid due to all the shouting. Kazuya mainly shouts inside his own head and it isn’t too bad.

I’m always a bit hesitant to recommend a TV show or a movie as I am definitely no critic and tend to be “easy” on this kind of media. And I’m even less of an expert on anime. But hey, if you have Crunchyroll and it sounds interesting, maybe give it a try. You might find it as endearing as I did. Though it CAN be a bit difficult to explain to your partner why you’re watching something with such a salacious title!

Fallout 76 News From Quake Con

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought I was done talking about Fallout 76 for a while but now we have some actual news courtesy of Quake Con, which is happening this weekend.

The next update, called Milepost Zero, is coming on September 3rd, which means the current season runs for 3 more weeks, ending on September 2nd. I can snag a lot more Perk Packs if I keep doing all the daily and weekly tasks for those three weeks!

In addition to the new season, there’s a new Legendary Crafting system that I’m a little wary of. It comes out on Sept 3rd as well. The general idea seems to be to give us more control over what we craft (right now it is pure RNG where we spend Legendary Modules and just HOPE we get the mods we want) and that’s a good thing, but the system is on the test server now and they seem to still be iterating and changing it in pretty big ways, and three weeks isn’t all that much time. I’m just a little worried the system is going to be wonky when it first launches, though I’m confident it’ll keep getting refined and improved after launch.

I haven’t played on the test server (since I play on Xbox) but it sounds like you’ll need to scrap Legendary Items that you get as drops for a “very small” (quote from one of the dev team on a Quake Con live stream) chance that you’ll learn the recipe to craft the mod for one of the Legendary Perks that were on that item. This leads me to believe that when the system is brand new, none of us are going to be crafting Legendary Gear for a while since first we’ll need to scrap a ton of stuff to learn the recipes. Fortunately I’m in a pretty good space for Legendary Weapons right now. The Legendary Mods you craft can be traded to other players so some lucky players who unlock recipes early are going to be rolling in caps from selling Mods.

There’s also a new game system coming for the update where you run a branch of the Blue Ridge Caravan Company. I haven’t seen a lot of details about that but it sounds like you’ll have to put together an Outpost, similar to your C.A.M.P., and then you can spawn caravans and will have to escort them to keep them safe. Other players can join in and help with the escort and these are intended to be farmable so I guess you’ll be able to fire them off as frequently as you want. I’m sure we’ll get more details on this system closer to launch.

Now that I’ve been doing a lot more PC gaming I’m kind of tempted to switch to the PC version of Fallout 76 for the new season. (I sure wish Bethesda would offer cross-progression for both FO76 and Elder Scrolls Online!) Tempted, but not sure it is wise. I have a lot of time invested in my Xbox account, and I bought a full year of Fallout 1st back in April so it is probably silly to walk away from the 7 months of remaining paid-for time. Maybe I just should dabble on PC this next season with an aim towards moving over completely sometime in Winter or next Spring, but not doing so until I have a PC character semi-established. Not sure I want to play without Fallout 1st, though… I guess I have time to sort this all out, though.

Anyway that’s it for today. A quick Fallout 76 post for a lazy Sunday!