Category Archives: Entertainment

Echoes of Wisdom is Merely OK

I played The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (as a distraction to avoid losing my mind reading the last giant batch of lab reports for the semester) since I finally found a copy for a vaguely reasonable price a few weeks ago, and will play anything from the franchise. It’s… OK. Thoughts:

  • The main echo gimmick is novel and mostly positive;
    • it’s narratively a neat way to have the player character (who is Zelda) not get their hands dirty
    • it’s pretty clear when you can learn something, and which things on screen are your echoes
    • it’s fun to try applying different echoes to situations
    • …but it involves a ton of menuing, which their attempts to make affordances for don’t quite cover up
    • and there are quite a few points where it’s aggravating to get an echo to do what you clearly need it to
  • The game is pretty short. A bit unsatisfyingly so.
  • The vast majority of puzzles are highly telegraphed and fairly trivial (most are just interesting enough to be satisfying) and a few are “go look up what obnoxious detail makes the obvious solution frustrating to execute”
  • The minor characters and side quests are not very interesting, which is something Zelda games are usually better at
    • I went in and played a bunch of side content after I beat the game, just looking for interest.
  • Several of the mechanics just…aren’t very useful:
    • If you can find a safe spot, you can always heal with a bed, so smoothies matter once for cold resistance and otherwise only if you need to heal during a boss because you did something dumb.
    • Once you have clouds, the other platforming-related echoes are largely irrelevant.
    • I… didn’t even bother with Dampe and the automatons until I went back to mop up stuff I missed after I finished. It feels more like an alternate pitch to the echo system that they didn’t quite let go of.

It’s not a bad game, but don’t pay full price.
Given that the 3D Zeldas for the Switch (BoTW and ToTK) were excellent, do those first if you haven’t. And if you specifically want a 2D Zelda-like and you haven’t played Tunic (which is a 2D Zelda influenced game whose magenta otherworldly corruption feels like it might have fed back into the franchise with this one), do that first, it’s more interesting.

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Cheap Lock Box is Cheap

I regularly have this problem where I have hobbies for which the equipment should be locked up when unattended, and I pick locks as a hobby and work as a computer engineer, so I know how bogus most of the options for locking stuff up are.

I bought one of those little portable lockboxes (Specifically a “Amazon Basics Portable Security Case Lock Box Safe, Combination Lock, Large, Black” ASIN B077K3FJHC), 50% to have a more responsible storage option for some small items, and 50% to see how crap it is.

I knew what I was buying for $18, and it’s still a hilarious piece of junk, because the gates are visible from the top so you can decode it by sight:

Combination is set to “0,1,2” and the dials are turned to “0,9,2.” Note that you can see a slot next to the wheel on 0 and 2 and not on 9? That’s because you can always see the gate when the correct number is dialed, so it’s trivial to decode.

A few points because it can’t be trivially re-set from the outside, you can’t pop the latch with a wire, the hinge pin won’t come out in the closed position without extensive violence, and there isn’t a tubular override key that can be trivially impressioned (common problems with similar products), but that lock is pathetic.
Amazon actually posted my review to the effect, so… I guess also points for honesty?

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Pull Your Xbox Clock Capacitor

If you have an OG Xbox sitting on a shelf somewhere, this is your reminder to pull the clock capacitor and clean up whatever corrosive goo it has already vomited out.
I was talking old video games with a student in one of my labs this week and it reminded me that this is one of the many projects I’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had time for for the last several years.

Photo highlighting the leaked clock capacitor in an OG Xbox.

Microsoft used some cheap 2.5V 1F early super caps which will inevitably fail and spray electrolyte on your motherboard, because they made some cost-cutting choices about the RTC, so now everyone with an old Xbox has to fix it.

iFixit has their usual helpful guide for pulling it apart, and the ConsoleMods wiki has the details on the clock cap situation. I didn’t even bother replacing the one in mine, I don’t pull my old Xbox out enough for it to matter.
Remove dead cap, clean residue thoroughly, move on. It’s a quick job.

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Look at this time crystal on shopgoodwill. A pristine Antec SX1030 case (or chieftech dragon or one of the other clones), painted metallic green with a window installed. Every commercial or DIY gaming PC in the first few years of … Continue reading

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I had nothing to do with this but I’m super excited. There has been a long-standing bug in the CPU emulation in Basilisk II (a 68K Macintosh emulator) that could be reliably triggered when *inhales* Bruno the shark killed you … Continue reading

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Tunic

I’ve been playing some Tunic the last few days, because the Steam Summer Sale managed to poke me at just the right moment to get an impulse buy. I was interested enough that I paid $20 for a game that came out like a year ago instead of my usual “Wait until I can pick it up for a few dollars and run it on a contemporary potato” gaming strategy.

It’s very to my taste, and I’m enjoying it, but it is, in classic self-indulgent indie game fashion, “Video game tropes: the game.” Not that there’s anything wrong with making things for your own in-group, but it winks so hard you start to wonder about a palsy.

The visual style and gameplay nod to everything. Fez. The whole Zelda franchise. Soulsbornes. Some Monument Valley style geometry illusion/architectural environmental storytelling. Bunches of stereotypical Supergiant details. It’s never met a game trope it didn’t like. They executed and integrated pretty well though, and I am in the market segment that connects to the references. [Ed: Oh look. Some Half Life 2 Citadel and more explicit Chrono Trigger refs late(?) game!]

It’s not …quite… as self-indulgent as Lenna’s Inception (same kind of 2D Zeldalike vein, did it a few summers ago, had slightly more fun than irritation about how hard it was sniffing its own farts), and it’s far more modern and sophisticated than the various Solarus engine games. The visual style is both cuter and more spectacular than either.

It also has the classic indie game feature of being relatively graphically simple, built on a major engine, and still being kind of a resource hog … though I’m playing on Linux via Proton/DXVK, on a workstation-model Polaris12 GPU, so some of the “Barely holding 24fps at 720p on a system that can do way more visually impressive games” is probably my fault [Ed: performance issue suddenly fixed after update and reboot, must have been a driver/system state thing]. I will say, having not played many commercial game for the last few years, the progress with transparent, performant functionality out of the Proton ecosystem is really impressive.

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Anbernic RG351(p) and Powkiddy RGB10 Max2 Button Membranes are Drop-In Compatible

I’ve had an Anbernic RG351P for roughly 2 years now, and it’s an absolutely delightful object.

For those unfamiliar: the RG351 is an example of a class of little gaming emulation handhelds that started back in the mid-to-late 2000s with things like the Dingoo A330. They are, essentially, a tiny ARM (+ usually Linux) machine the size and shape of a handheld gaming device, set up with a built-in controller specifically to run games in emulation. The stock firmware on the RG351 is an ancient EmulationStation/RetroArch/Linux stack, but there are better alternatives – IMO, throwing in a decent SD card loaded with AmberElec is the first thing to do when you get one. It will play essentially everything from the dawn of gaming through the PlayStation and some (but not all) of the Nintendo 64 library, and has limited/marginal support for PSP and DS. It is …straightforward but not the sort of thing I’ll link… to obtain the full ROMsets for these platforms, they are frankly not that large. I paid about $90 for mine, I think they’ve gone up a bit, but there are a whole range of similar options at different price points, build qualities, and platform support.

The build quality, however, isn’t perfect. It’s small-brand China-export hardware. You know you have to be a little careful with it just from handling (I keep mine in a fitted case when throwing it in a bag). I’ve been through a screen (I got red lines in my original after about a year), re-gluing the back rubber pads (original glue melted), and now after two years I wore through the membrane behind the “A” button, and that’s actually what this post is about.

I opened it up, found the worn though button, looked around online, couldn’t any in stock, contacted Anbernic through their AliExpress store front (none available), asked the subreddit (no leads), and couldn’t come up with any exact replacement membranes.

HOWEVER on inspection, the membranes from the similar Powkiddy RBG10 appeared extremely similar, and those are readily available (as a $12ish pack of all the membranes and button caps to refit an RGB10, which includes two of the 4x membranes). I ordered this set via Aliexpress, and ~16 days later when it showed up, can confirm the membranes are slightly different, but drop-in compatible.

As you can see from the photos, the Powkiddy membranes have a bit more flat area, and the bottoms of the mounting holes are filled in rather than fully punched through, but the dimensions are exactly right. The height and force of the domes is even almost identical to the originals, and at effectively $6/membrane it’s a very reasonable repair.

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Toys for my Escape Velocity Itch

Printed and painted Kestrel and Lightning models on a PowerBook 5,4

I had my regularly-scheduled itch to play Escape Velocity or one of its successors and/or clones the other week, and decided to play the real thing this time since I did a lap on Endless Sky not too long ago, and NAEV still doesn’t quite grab me.

I’m now most of the way through a game of EV (under emulation in Basilisk II), and …impulse bought a cheap 2004 15″ Aluminum PowerBook G4 (a 5,4) off the internet after a crash ate a save file. I have good coverage of Apple 1984-1994 in my collection (in the form of bulky desktops with CRTs), and x86 OS X is pretty easy to run in a VM, but I have a hole in the late PPC era. That machine will hopefully eventually also get its own post as I finish fixing it up, it’s not in perfect condition but it auctioned below prevailing when I was looking, and seems to be acceptable.

While I was looking into the player communities (…because it’s become very hard to set up a working install of EV Nova recently, and I can’t find a backup of my registered copy) I discovered that a couple months ago some wonderful person (slurked on thingiverse/quarmus on reddit) made and shared 3D models of the Kestrel and Lightning ships from the original EV.

…So the little Mac-user child of the 90s in me promptly headed down to the basement to print a Kestrel and a pair of Lightnings.

I gave them a quick sand to take the worst print artifacts off and sprayed them down with a couple coats of gray Krylon Fusion, which gave a decent base coat. I needed to do a little (bad) detail painting on the Lightnings, and the acrylics I have around didn’t stick well to the spraypaint, so I dug out my decades-old Testor model enamel set. Eventually they were shaken and stirred enough to get the job done; in another post post, an absurd over-engineered shaker that didn’t really solve the problem.

EV is still one of my favorite games, though I think Endless Sky’s implementation of the formula is actually significantly better for a modern player without the memories, especially now that Ambrosia is defunct and the hacks around registering Nova seem to not be working.

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Stadia: Why?

I got one of the free-with-YouTube-Premium Stadia Premiere kit + Pro trials just out of curiosity (since I’m waiting to cancel until Play Music actually stops working, and why say no to $100 of free toys), and after playing for it for an evening, while I’m very technically impressed … I’m completely baffled as to why anyone would pay for this thing, or especially “buy” individual games on it.

It is fast and surprisingly responsive, and the (insane) distributed “phone or computer + controller + Chomecast all talk to the internet and also to Bluetooth and manage to stay in sync” wizardry is an amazing technical achievement, as is the low-latency, reasonably low-artifact streaming.

…but the subscription/rental library is tiny, expensive, and non-portable. It sucks a massive amount of bandwidth (it seemed to be holding at about 20-25Mbit/s down during my AAA test). The fact that I need a minimum of three independent devices (since you can’t do most of the configuration or library management with the controller + Chromecast) to play on the TV is awkward, and the layers of account management and device syncing are pretty wonky for a single user, I can’t imagine dealing with it in a multi-user household.

I played a little bit of Celeste (as an input lag test; it was not half bad, though playing it on a controller is not my preference), a little bit of Hitman (To see how heavy duty graphical games would do), and a little The Gardens Between (hadn’t played it, in my Pro trial, looked neat) – and they worked, but nothing about the experience was particularly compelling.

The whole free-kit-for-Premium-subscribers thing feels like a desperate attempt to dump their hardware stock to build enough user base to recoup the back-end costs for another doomed Google product that will die as soon as the current back end ages out and the workforce moves on to career-advancing shiny new things – after Buzz, Reader, Plus, Play Music, the steady churn of ever-worse chat tools, and half a dozen other products that were useful enough to take all the air out of a market before being unceremoniously dumped Google has lost all credibility for paid rentals or ecosystem investment.

All the freebie premiere kits are going to be Goodwill gold in a couple years though – the controllers are decent (Not $70 decent, but decent) and seem to work as normal HID devices, and there are two nice USB power bricks with cables in there.

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Why did a Banggood package I ordered on March 26 just appear in Bahrain on July 5, the same day it finally showed “Shipment picked up?” Did it just get packed into a container and loaded on whatever outgoing vessel … Continue reading

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