Games

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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.
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The way a box full of crap in the closet works:

  1. Didn’t I have Zeonic Front for the PlayStation 2?
  2. Gah, to much crap to check huge box without taking the shit off the lid.
  3. Take all the stuff out of closet.
  4. Drag box out to living room.
  5. Sneeze. A few times.
  6. Rummage through everything three times.
  7. Huh, not here!? Where else would I have kept it.
  8. You know what? Screw this.
  9. Find somewhere less troublesome to store this crap.
And if I had just went with the emulator approach I’d probably be done by now, versus trying to find the actual disc for my PlayStation 2.
On the flip side my overflow area for books has enough room to hold the remains of my PC floppy and ‘D-ROM, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2 game collections.
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Sadly doesn’t look like SWAT 3 runs on modern systems, compatibility modes for XP and 9x don’t help nore does dandy tricks emulating an old GPU in software ala dgVoodoo. Although I suppose, loading Win98SE into a virtual machine might work.

That’s a great shame because the game was both pretty well done and ahead of its time nearly ~20 years ago. It remains the best tactical shooter I’ve ever played, and that’s probably been a lot over the years.

On the flipside with a little lovin’ the original R6 runs pretty well. The only technical issue I’ve had is a ghosting between the mouse cursor in and out of game which makes using the menus a hard on the eyes. Rather than taking my chances: I stuffed dgVoodoo’s Direct3D libraries in to begin with. R6 is so old it still offered a software renderer, so might not be so necessary.

I remember first playing Rainbow Six and finding it both intently interesting and quite frustrating as a kid; mainly for the laser-eyed snapshot of death effect, which is not as big a problem decades later. What remains irksome though is that path finding was effectively infantile back then. Thus in a game that resolved to plan a strike with multiple fire teams — you’ve got an A.I. that can barely avoid walking into walls just trying to follow you around. Aside from that, I’d say it remains a good game.

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Scary advances in time and drive tech: when you plop in an old game CD and it feels like most of the install time is how fast you can read unpack the data off a CD-ROM.

Rummaging through the bin in my closet, I went looking for my old tactical game of the year edition of SWAT 3. Along side it of course the sequel, my original copy of R6 III: Raven Shield and the first Rainbow Six. Needless to say when these games originally shipped most people had IDE hard drives and Windows 9x still had a very large market share. SSDs didn’t exist :P. Installing games off CD-ROM took quite a bit longer when SWAT 3 was a young game; I think I just spent a whopping five minutes counting disc changing.

Hmm, kind of wonder if there’s still a copy of the patch file for R6 anywhere. I still remember downloading that 33~35 meg file once upon a dial up life and being glad that no one had called our phone number for nearly four consecutive hours ^_^.

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Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.