Year: 2019

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When it comes to the PC port of FFVIII, I imagine that there’s only two views to take of the train mission. Either its creator was a kind soul for giving you plenty of time, or your mind might flash to Robin Williams’ line in Mrs. Doubtfire about the masochistic bastard who invented high heels, and picturing some game porter with a set of nine inch heels jammed up their butt.

My simple solution to the translation problem:

numeric code -> on screen key map -> actual controller map

Is to configure the game’s keyboard settings to use 1, 2, 3, 4 for the specified actions. Taking advantage of the fact that the game basically requires the same number of buttons the original GameBoy worked with.

While the button miss-ordering is apparently a known issue with the port, I rather hope that the U.S. PlayStation release didn’t have a similar grumble to it, lol.

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Rubba dub, dub! Rub that magic lamp and have a long ass, brutual, determined to drag his ass out for a fight until the bring of death and beyond.

After rubbing the lamp it wasn’t long before Zell fell, and Selphie mid battle.  All the GFs fell before Diablos’ mighty gravity area of affect pretty promptly, so I effectively got stuck having to widdle his health down with basic strikes. Blinding him at least limited his ability to spam AoE *and* lunge a fighter to prompt death but didn’t really help with the endless stream of gravity strikes. Losing the healer lead to trading draw-cast-cures and sword strikes, after losing the ability to tag team DPS him between cure cycles. A steady flow based on draw-cast-curing my way to survivle between his area of effect spams.

In the end, expecting to lose my head, a quick scan revealed the drowsy beast was down to about 700 HP. Shouting “WHO DARES, WINS!”, I rather picked my ass off the floor and went back to buisness–working in as many magic strikes as I could.

For better or worse determination doesn’t tend to be my problem in clearing part of a game.

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Explaining to dogs that refried beans are not for them is bound to never go well. Ending with “If I gave you this: you would fart, and we would all die”, is probably not the best idea either.

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If I ever get the option of being reincarnated, I hope that dog with a good comfy home is an option rather than coming back as a human.

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AppleInsider: I replaced my Mac with my iPad Pro for a week — here’s how it went.

Kudos for not publicly blaming the app developer when you’re test driving a beta version of the operating system and relatively young features.

The concept that things aren’t difficult but more time consuming, and the feeling of jumping between apps is typical of pushing modern mobile-centric operating systems harder than most. Or at least that’s my opinion having been a tablet but since Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

What I think people should really ask themselves are three things:

  1. Do I really do that often?
  2. Is what I do most, smooth?
  3. Can I do this here?

When you do something very often it becomes more important how smooth the process is.

If you spend a lot of time shuffling data between applications, paradigms like: Android intents (sharing), drag & drop, and the almighty Unix pipe become more important IMHO. Spending time juggling file open and save as dialogs; etc can become a drag pretty rapidly when what you’re really trying to do is manipulate and share data instead of leaving a trail of temporary files. I get happier when I can quickly move my data between applications without having to go out of my way to make the transfer happen.

Just because a method of operation or workflow is different doesn’t mean it sucks or that it is great.

What’s the quality difference between one tap and two menus deep? How often you do it! We find ourselves doing certain tasks more frequently than others. You will evaluate a function in a spreadsheet cell far more often than you will lookup what function performs any given task. As a side effect it’s effective to be able to smoothly insert common functions with a little typing; a menu to find a specific type of function instead of Googling it is a plus. Having to walk through several menus and a multi page wizard as the only way to input data would just be deranged and painful for an application like a spreadsheet. Software for getting real work done will care more about the tasks you do all the damn time than software just trying to do the task once in a blue moon.

But here’s the one that tends to be most cut and dry: can you really do this? Yes, odds are you can or you will give up pretty quickly. Just because you can run a word processor on your phone doesn’t mean you should write that five hundred page novel on your phone. Just because it’s backed up to the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t cry when you drop your phone in the toilet either 😜.

Software takes time to mature and different people (and problem domains) have different ways of working. There is a big gap between what you do constantly and what you do occasionally, and that tends to be where it goes south.

Ahh, now I’m rambling 😂.

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https://photos.app.goo.gl/CCHmWMBjYqMVjaan9

Two years ago and still comfortable little gooners.

Signs you’ve been playing video games too long

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After learning enough of Final Fantasy VIII’s battle system to beat the bastard upon the communications tower, it felt rather rewarding to watch Elvoret go down. In fact I kinda think he was designed for that: because enough force is required to beat your way through Briggs / Wedge / Elvoret that if you’ve just winged it and puttered about, to flatten Elvoret you’ll have to be doing something right or your party will eventually fall.

And then of course once you’ve got him cut down to size: got thirty minutes to reach the extraction point, and a big assed robotic spider whose first encounter makes him invincible until you flee. That just figures. Because after finally having that victory, why not force the player to run like hell and if they’re effective, manage to blow the still-even-more-hit-point-bastard to kingdom come as he chases you to the beaches: or let the attractive Quistis do it with a machine gun ^_o.

Yes. Somehow this follow up just seems appropriate to me. On the flip side it doesn’t take for freaking ever. Like the massive Dungeon Crawl that can occur in Dragon Age: Origins if you decide nope, not killing the little possessed tike, but haven’t helped the Mages with their little cluster fuck…. I seem to remember tackling that castle going from “Eh, should take a break soon” over to “Alright, just how many dungeons was this crawl?”; If memory serves it was three or four depending on how you view the castle, the circle, and the occasional trips to the land of freaky things.

Actually, one of these days I really should revisit DA:O. It was probably the first RPG game that I really got into and enjoyed the ever loving crap out of rather than getting bored after a few hours.

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Testing a pair of headphones, what is the first thing I fire off? P!nk’s Funhouse!

So far for a cheap pair of headphones the Mpow H7 Plus definitely exceed my ears requirements but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything base heavy. Sometimes headphones are more convenient than my antique 2.1 system, which usually means having to jack my Xbox headset into its AUX IN or Centauri’s motherboard.

Ordinarily, I think I’d just get a second pair of AF32s as I’ve been very happy with my pair from back in ’13. But the prices on the current gen are a bit too steep for my blood. Unlike the pair I use with my tablet there isn’t a 50% off deal.

But that’s where in lays the rub. When I want to use headphones it’s a bother to screw with things. When you’re turned into a dog chair sometimes having a wire between your desk and head isn’t convenient and neither is repairing devices often. Being cheap and lazy has its side effects.

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Prime Day Deal on Fire TV Stick 4K

So $25 for the 4K stick and $15 for the 1080p sick? Well I’m likely sold.

A while back I was debating if I wanted to retire my first generation (2014 iirc) Fire TV box with one of the modern iterations of the Fire TV Stick just for the upgraded codec support.

Pretty much my old first generation box and Sandy Ivy Bridge desktop are the last Gizmos I use that lacks H.265 support. My desktop, well it doesn’t spend its days playing video and can probably brute force anything 1080p at this point.

The only reasons to hang on to my first generation box is it still works damned great and the Ethernet port happens to be a short trip to my network. That and the dollars per year of usage must be ludicrously awesome by now, lol.