Games

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Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month.

I find it kinda interesting how the trends have been leaning with the subscription concept. The real need for folks to make a profit is usually what drives decisions; most on the other side of the coin want a decent experience, and if you’re lucky would actually pay something.

Right now, we have a reasonably successful subscription model offered on Xbox. Google and Apple are both launching game subscriptions for their platforms. I’d sign up in a heartbeat if Valve offered a good one for Steam.

To me, personally I think its a great idea.

Over in more serious gaming land, most of the revenue model seems to be focused on sales early in the game release cycle. After a while, being in a subscription package is probably a way for publishers to gain more revenue not less. How well that translates into mobile, I do wonder.

Generally I’ve long since stopped caring about Android gaming. There’s good potential there but short of something Android powered and as universally successful as a PlayStation or Xbox, it’ll never become the gaming platform I’d like to see; read enough it to keep a Window license laying around. But more than a few people play games on their phones and tablets, whether or not the games are crappy or spectacular, there’s plenty of players.

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Making a brief foray into iOS games, ironically begins with République.

It’s been quite a while since the game came out (2013 – 2016) but it’s quite nice to see the graphics quality. Scrolling through the app store, there were three real reasons I opted to play: more serious gameplay than I’ll usually go for on touchscreens, far larger than your average app (~3.2G), and should show whether or not the GPU on this thing is worth while.

Beyond that, I’d say try the game 😜

I also found it kind of funny, the selection of banned books you can find laying around. More than a few are recommendations from family and friends over the years, and for better or worse ones I haven’t gotten around to reading, lol.

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CNET: Nintendo Switch’s new SNES feature is ruining everything.

After reading this, I’m not sure if I should grumble or snortle for a number of reasons. But when I remember the difficulty of video games from my era, I kinda picture children today in tears.

My theory still is time oriented.

Big dollar games come out all the time. You play them. You move on. That’s what the industry wants. Games these days begging easier, some of that is good design and some of that reflects that we won’t be playing it very long.

By contrast the games I had as a child, all had long shelf lives. When I got my SNES, I played Super Mario World and Super Mario All Stars pretty often. Those were new, cool things when I was a little kid. When my SNES finally was retired, closer to the PlayStation 2 era than the N64, I still played them.

I remember a card game that I played around middle school age, called Yu-Gi-Oh. My Game Boy cartridge is sitting in the closet somewhere next to Pokemon Blue and Gold. You see, I used to play that Yu-Gi-Oh cartridge a lot. One day I figured out how the really simple A.I. worked. No matter what the long game looked like, the A.I. would calculate the best response to your move. Knowing this, it didn’t take much crunching to decide how to manipulate the A.I. and defeat it. Always.

Why did I stop playing that cartridge? Was it because I lost my interest in the card game? Nope. In fact, I still enjoyed the trading card game for a number of years after that. I stopped playing the video game version because it was too damned easy. It went from passing time with some fun to wasting time with no fun. Thanks to removing the challenge.

By contrast, the only thing that really changed about how I play Super Mario Bros is the words I shout at the screen 🤣. When I revisited the game in my twenties, I wondered how I didn’t smash it, and then remembered how hard it was to get new video games back then. Hehe.

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Digital Trends: Xbox One S All-Digital Edition review: No-Disc Dystopia.

Personally, I think the price point is the whole deal here.

In concept the game discs are a nice idea, if you can’t handle downloading 60~80 GB in a single day beacause of your limited internet connectivity. In practice the disc is little more than a license key, for most games: you will still have to download enough data that it may as well be a small menary card with an activation code. For smaller titles the download might be a DVD or two worth; for big famous games it will still likey be Blu-Ray sized.

So really, all you are doing is making it so the disc must be in the drive to play, in exchange for being able to sell or trade the game in the second hand market. That’s great if it is something you will play once and dispose of next week. For the rest of us, we will probably take whichever one costs less or won’t require pants.

The reallity that the game will be complete and never in need of software updates is far more dead than releasing games on disc. Sadly IMHO, but at least we live in a world where publishers don’t have to snail mail you a floppy diskettes in x weeks before you can get through that dungeon without a glitch making your sabatons fall off, and your character endlessly spin eastward for the rest of the game.

For me personally, the win of my original model Xbox One having a disc drive is the ability to watch movies on Blu-ray. All of my other devices are limited to streaming files from my server or external services like Netflix; most of my devices don’t have an optical disc drive. And the one that does it’s used for ripping discs for my private home streaming needs. I don’t think you could walk into Walmart and expect to find a cheap ass Blu-ray player back when the Xbox One launched, so much as a free to good home VCR at the dump.

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Ahh, I’m reminded of what really makes me hate NT: hardware support.

Ever since my good cable got a tad bent at the connector, I’ve only had two cables that really like to drive my Xbox One controller. One that’s like 3 meters, and one that’s like 30 centimetres: neither of which is particularly fun with my desk. But at least they work, if you deal with the cable lengths.

So, I figure let’s try the wireless adapter for Windows. Well, guess what? It’s shit.

The “Slim” model 1790 now available doesn’t work with Windows 10, 1903, up to date as of what Microsoft lets my desktop get. As far as the base operating system is concerned there is no driver for this device–none, nadda, zilcho!

If you browse the go fetchy it catalog referenced in places like this and this, and get a bit creative in pointing Windows at various entries and fine one that’ll actually match the device: the most you’ll get is an error code: “The software for this device has been blocked from starting because it is known to have problems with Windows. Contact the hardware vendor for a new driver. (Code 48)”. If you give up more easily than I do when I’m tired and almost ready for sleep: you’ll just get a message saying it didn’t find squat that works with the driver you extracted.

Because why would you expect Microsoft’s driver’s to work with Microsoft’s hardware? That’s a lot to ask, I guess.

In my experience there are really only three kinds of drivers for Windows.

  1. Those that just work, and often those come with the Microsoft’s install.
  2. Those that almost never work; and
  3. Those that are about as stable as drunk with ten shots of rum in’em.

On the flipside scenario 3 is why error codes like 48 exist. Not being able to use a piece of hardware is frequently better than it turning the rest of your experience to crap.

For the extra curious nerd, the device reports itself as usb vid 045e pid 02fe in the device manager’s GUI. 0x45e being MS’s USB vendor id. Dunno what their product ids in the wild are, and I’m not buying multiple adapters to find out.

The Microsoft Xbox One Wireless Adapter for Windows kit also comes with a really nice but rather short length USB extension cable. Which aside from being an overpriced cable when you consider the wireless adapter is actually a paperweight until MS fixes the driver, does in fact solve my real problem. I.e. if I was smart I would’ve just bought a decent cable in a length > 0.3 & < 3.0 meters long instead of MS’s wireless adapter. Ha! 🤣

Thus my real solution is to take the extension cable that came with the useless wireless adapter, plug in my too damned short cable I wanted to replace, hook up my controller and go play a damned game before my head droops and hits the desk.

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One of the many problems with a night of long, hard questing: when real life says time for bed, and your brain is still in a far away land rather than drowsy.

On the flip side, FF14’s Conjurer class is proving much better than I had expected. Before the week is out, I’ll probably have hit the same level that I managed to get to via Gladiator in a Sunday of questing. Primary difference being the gap between available time.

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Things that could only happen in an RPG game, I’m sure:

Quest x: get a nice leather armour.

Quest y: get a +1 defense rated “revealing” armour.

As if you started with the kind that would be just perfect for an adventure wondering the countryside. Then cut it down until it was basically a leather bra and suspenders.

Aptly by the time the sets were completed, my Miqo’te gladiator went from looking like a knight napping under a tree to a bandit slut in need a whirp.

That said, FF14 in the course of hasa hard day’s questing and several suits of armor: the game has generally shown equipment that looks like something you would want to wear on a battlefield instead of going down the boobplate route; it’s just that I find it amusing that the leather version of boobplate was a +1 to the more conventional armour.

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Never given that much mind to such characters but after playing through Y’jhimei‘s Adventurer From Another World quest in FFXV, there’s probably a fair chance someday I’ll be making a character in some MMO and my mind will flash to the Miqo’te from FFIV.

And here I thought, my next character inspiration would probably be inspired by the likes of Naotsugu from Log Horizon.