I don’t remember a barrel aged beer I didn’t like yet. This Swedish Imperial Stout is no exception. Very smooth and sweet, like a cold brew with maple. With surprisingly tall head, half glass of it. As with most barrel aged imperial stouts, feeling relaxed, but not heavy, despite 12.5 ABV.
I’ve been cooking my steaks sous vide in a slow cooker for a year or so. Finally, I decided to get a proper sous vide. After some research, I settled on Anova. Then I discovered that it is 50% cheaper in the US, so I decided to get one during my trip.
That was easy enough. But then “luckily” coming back to the UK I decided to check voltage before plugin it. And it’s 110V only. If I’d plugged it, it would have fried immediatelly. There’s such a thing as step down voltage transformers. But for 1000W, they cost as much as the cooker itself.
So I ended up buying another one in the UK. I went for a slightly older version than the one I brought from US, but looking at the specs, I’m not sure why I would pay 100GBP more in the UK for it. At first I thought that the sleeve wasn’t removable in the old version, but it is.
The first dish I cooked was scallops. They worked out perfectly. Then I tried poached eggs. I was very excited, as sous vide promised you could cook them in their shells. Two recipes suggested 75C for 12 minutes. It was a disaster. The shells wouldn’t separate, the whites too runny 🤷♂️
Next is cooking a steak, I guess.
Next I decided to go back and shoot down Fi and Clarkson, which took me to the UFEO scenario.
Park, the UFEO commander, is corrupt and working with Uoroboros to pit General and Neucom in order to eliminate both.
There’s an interesting twist in he mission where you need to bomb nanomachines: Rena’s plane gets infected, and you need to hit it with a freefalling bomb 😬
It’s explained that Dision onboarded Rena into an experimental program convincing her to install neurolink so she could pilot Night Raven. Then he was killed by General either because Neucom split or for another reason, but managed to preserve himself in Electrosphere.
He offers Night Raven to Rena, but she uses it to shoot the zeppelin out of the sky. She crashes, but survives to be picked up by Nemo (the protagonist) and Erich. The strange helicopter you blow in the English version turns out to be Park trying to flee.
This ending is much more positive, and also the entire scenario is easier: Su43 you get from UFEO is far better than the aircraft from Neucom, and there are no annoying boss battles or tunnel runs at all.
At the mission where you need to escort the UN diplomat, Fi is onboard with him when you’re ordered to shoot the aircraft, because Clarkson is about to defect to Neucom. Rena doesn’t care, but Erich objects. Another choice.
Joining Neucom we’re introduced to Cynthia, Fi’s edler sister. Turns out she is a Neucom ace, and obsessed with “Sublimation”, or in other words transcending into cyberspace.
Another choice, either follow her and join Ouroboros, or stay with Fi and Neucom. I didn’t save that broad just to let her go! So I stay with Fi.
In the underground, we fight Rena, then Dision. Now at least I understand who I fought in the English version. And that’s it, end of Neocom scenario. No delirious fight in Electrosphere. I thought that fighting Dision for a second time would be better. It wasn’t.
Rena receives a message from her sister telling her that she’s happy in cyberspace. The end.
I mentioned that Ace Combat 3 was the longest Ace Combat I played, and now I understand why. They mashed together missions from different scenarios. So I didn’t get to blow a train or to fight a virus or to free a path for a falling zeppelin. A single campaign in the Japanese version takes under an hour, pretty standard for Ace Combat games.
It’s time to compare the English disgrace with Japanese original. First, there are two fan translations: Project Nemo and LoadWordTeam
Second is considered superior.
The experience from the translated Japanese version couldn’t be more different from the English one. In English you are thrown into the fight with little to no exposition. In Japanese version, you sit for 5 minutes watching news reports (animation is by Production IG, Ghost in the Shell) and getting codec calls, as you are introduced to Rena, Erich (Erik?) and Fiona. Rena is Motoko Kusanagi of this universe, a pilot prodigy that is allergic to sunlight, so she muses why would she need human body at all. Erich and Fi are your peers at UPEO (which is like NATO), and Park is your superior.
In the English version, you almost always fought alone, and when you did have allies, they were anonymous. Here the aircrafts are clearly labeled.
There are more planes available, both initially and as you progress. The weirdest airplanes, like a Catamaran one, are not playable at all in the English version.
The first branching path is as soon as Mission 4. The way you chose between branches is which of the aircrafts you follow.
At first you fight with General against Neucom Neocon. Then you defend Neucom from General. Then Rena asks you to come with her to reclaim an aircraft she was testing as a child, Night Raven. Only with full version the mission names start to make some sense. “Paper Tiger” refers to the fact that everyone thinks NATO is a joke. And “No Clearance” is both a piloting term, and refers to the fact you are following Rena despite your orders.
I probably already mentioned that the original Xbox came with a meager 8GB HDD drive. I had 120GB SSD lying around, so I decided to upgrade it.
Needed IDE to SATA adapter, since all SSDs are SATA, and a 80 wires IDE cable, since SATA can’t work with the 40 wires one Xbox came with. But with enough patience, I got everything I needed.
Interesting that Xbox is a clamshell, that has very long screws that hold top and bottom parts together. Also, you need star screwdriver, not a cross one common to PCs. Luckily I had all the tools I needed.
Once you disassemble the console, you can see that similarly to Dreamcast, it’s basically a PC motherboard with an integrated nVidia graphics card.
The most common trick to upgrade the HDD is called a “hot swap”. There is a single cable that connects both CDROM and HDD to the motherboard. Xbox won’t boot without a CDROM. But if you let Xbox boot up, then disconnect CDROM and connect slave HDD instead, it will recognize the drive.
I didn’t want to perform that trick at first, so I tried to just connect original HDD to my PC, and copy C and E drives. But that didn’t work out, as the drive is locked, and you cannot unlock it with USB adapter, only when connected with IDE cable.
So I went back to the hotswap method. It went smoothly: you connect the drive, then use utility called Chimp that clones it to the slave, then just swap the two.
Now I have Xbox with space enough to store every game I’m interested in.
One simple truth every retrogamer learns is that no hardware is eternal. In case of my Dreamcast, the PSU started acting lately. At first I thought it’s the discs, as sometimes it wouldn’t boot at all, or take a long time to boot, or load a game then reboot after a few seconds.
Luckily, there are a couple of solutions nowadays. The most popular is DreamPSU, which replaces the proprietary plug and a massive board with a tiny board compatible with standard 12V adapters. Then there’s CleanPower, which allows it to use USB-C, but twice as expensive. I decided to start with DreamPSU.
And since I’m going to disassemble Dreamcast anyway, I decided that replacing my CDROM (sorry, GDROM) with an GDEMU that reads games from a SD card would be appropriate to. Great thing about both mods is that you don’t need to solder anything. Dreamcast had a PC-like architecture, so you can just unplug your CDROM and PSU. And to get to them, you just remove 4 regular screws.
Expected benefit: now there’s no need to swap discs, or burn them. Also, the games boot much faster since there’s no seek time.
Unexpected benefit: console is 460g lighter. CDROM is 310g, and PSU is another 150g (I thought it’d be even heavier).
Anime isn’t dead, it’s just financed by Netflix now.
I haven’t played Cyberpunk yet, so I might be not familiar with all the terms, but on the other hand, it’s so derivative from the genre there isn’t much that I feel I’m missing.
Storywise, it’s pretty standard. You have Boy with Abilities, in our case ability to slow time, or more correctly speed himself up, more than a regular implant user should. We have a Misterious Girl that saves him.
We have a gang he runs with.
Animation is serviceable. There aren’t that many frames, and they use shortcuts (cloud of gunmoke never changes shape, it’s just a decall), but the style compensates for it.
I also appreciate how mature it is. Isn’t afraid of ultraviolence or nudity.
Timeskip is another bit I appreciate. Allows for a character growth within a season.
My favorite character ended up being not David or Lucy, but Becca:
Despite her child-like appearance and obvious inspiration from Harley Quinn.
It’s a beautiful and complete story, and I’m glad they didn’t try to extend it further.
Completed Ace Combat 3.
English version of Ace Combat 3 is a complete mess. It’s like watching a silent movie from 1920, where every few missions you’re interrupted by a paragraph of text that makes little to no sense.
It’s the longest Ace Combat in terms of number of missions by far: 35 missions, compared to about 25 in most other titles.
Once you get used to the controls, the game is relatively easy, until the chase in the Geofront. Every Ace Combat game makes you fly through a tunnel. But that’s the only game I remember that has you do it for 5 minutes straight. It’s a torture.
And then you need to duel a X49 superfighter, similarly to Ace Combat Zero. But it’s very hard to tell if you hit it or not. And all that without saving in-between. I call it “superfigher” for lack of better term, as it is able to take ridiculous number of missile hits, and instead of firing missiles back it uses some kind of a laser.
After that there’s a long an unfulfilling fight against both X49 and UI4054 Aurora, that feels just random in the way they avoid missiles. During my first attempt, I simply ran out of missiles, and I had almost 200 of them, and gave up. Second attempt took me 18 minutes of chasing one then the other.
Didn’t enjoy it? It’s a shame, because you’ll have to repeat it two more times, beating Aurora first in another dogfight, then in Virtual Reality (the eponymous Electrosphere).
In terms of game length, it’s hard to measure, as it doesn’t let you save for the last 5 missions. 30th mission was 2:30 hours, and considering that just mission 33 took me 18 minutes, I’d say it’s around 3:30 hours of play time, which is again, longer than most Ace Combat games.
Visually it’s very compelling. Writing tries to be snarky, which I don’t appreciate, but at least it’s brisk.
Good example is when Wednesday escapes her therapist, the principal asks “What happened?”, and therapist just gives a sigh. Bad writing would be to explain that Wednesday escaped through bathroom window, despite we’ve just seen it.
Peel that away, though, and you have a school drama through and through. And Wednesday is this Marie Sue that knows Italian, can fence, play cello and beat three boys in a fistfight.
The only saving grace so far is that they aren’t afraid to discard characters quickly.
Finished watching Gentlemen.
Probably the best Ritchie ever created, simply because the format of the miniseries let him explore a lot of different British subcultures. You get the Scouse, Brummies, gypsies, Albanians, and probably more which I forgot.
Ending is a bit weak. I expected something with more punch, like Penguin did.
So I finally got to finish watching Persona 4 anime.
It’s probably confusing to watch if you didn’t play the game, but it does repeats some of the best moments. So it’s like a way to refresh your memory on the story.
They did well with the Nanako hospital scene, finishing the episode with her flat lining. And then the followup lynching scene.
And while the series was light on fighting scenes until the last three episodes, when fight kicks off with Adaci, it’s quite spectacular.
In the original game, I remember it as quite boring, because you just fight that dark cop. But here, instead they put Reaper and Dark Izanagi instead (Izanagi is the persona Yu, the protagonist uses).
Interesting for Shin Megamin Tensei fans only, but still, the way Yu defeats Amano Sagiri is by summoning Lucifer, the strongest Persona in most games.
And they actually made the final twist better. In the game, it was the secret ending, and or was a bit tedious to pull. But here, they went for a fake ending, then into Groundhog Day, and even gave Yu a shadow, which I think the game didn’t have because Yu was the Joker (or in other words a silent placeholder for the player).
Overall, I liked the anime more than I expected. Especially for the finale.
They did simplify the mini games. In Ace Combat 2 I didn’t to manage to land once. Here I managed both landing and refueling in air.
There are a few very inventive missions, one of which has you pilot a stratosphere fighter, and another a spacecraft taking down satelites.
Chasing a train is fun and stupid at the same time, as this mission can be completed in 30 seconds.
“Swarm” mission throws so many enemies at you, I was afraid to run out of missiles. But at least they are finite, unlike Ace Combat 2 and Ace Combat 4 missions. Also, you have an ally in this mission, that is even helpful and downs some enemies, but you have absolutely no context who that is.
I wanted to write first that this game is unbelievable. Then I remembered that Ultima 7 came out a couple years before. Still, what the game does is impressive for ’94.
The best way to describe it is an RPG without character progression. You have inventory of limited capacity, but the items you find aren’t necessarily unique. You open a drawer in your girlfriend’s kitchen, and there are two knives and two forks. You pick your wallet, open it, and there’s a credit card and a photo.
Computers operates on floppies, so you insert one, then type commands into a terminal.
The problem with all that freedom, though, is that the game feels almost impossible without a guide. And there’s also sort-of copy-protection, whereas the game came with “Diary of a Madman” that has things like the code to your appartment written down, which you can’t find anywhere else in the game.
I’ve never heard that song, nor seen the clip until now.
But all I’ve got to say: Ghost in the Shell changed the world forever.
Also, the character looks like Sarah Bryant from Virtua Fighter. At first I thought it’s some old OVA.
So I got myself original Xbox (I hate calling it OG Xbox) after scouring eBay for some time.
First impression: damn, it’s huge. Compared to PS2 Slim I have it’s eight times bigger.
Second impression: damn, the gamepad is also huge. I wasn’t sure if I want the original “Duke” gamepad or the more modern “Japanese” one, but in the end I lost the bid for the Japanese one, and got the Duke. It is not just wide, but also very thick. My hands are average, but I have to stretch my fingers to reach the buttons.
I didn’t remember it had two slots for memory cards in the controller. Just like Dreamcast. And in general, it reminds me of Dreamcast so much I wonder if they took an inspiration. But whereas the Dreamcast controller was bulky because of the VMU, here the huge Xbox logo doesn’t serve any purpose.
Of course I wanted the console softmoded. It is done with a USB drive, but there is a catch, or even two. First, Xbox doesn’t have USB ports, only proprietary gamepad ports and the memory slots inside a gamepad. So you need an adapter that plugs into gamepad port. Those are widely available, though, so getting one is not a problem. The problem is to get a USB stick it would recognize. I tried creating small partitions, I tried microSD card adapters, nothing worked, except a single no-name USB stick I got with my jailbroken PS4. So now I have a magic USB stick that jailbreaks both PS4 and Xbox. Although with Xbox, it’s a persistent softmod, so I don’t expect to repeat it.
After softmodding the console, the easiest way to get games on it is to connect it with a network cable to your router. Here’s a thing, though. The original Xbox had a HDD, but it was 8GB IDE, and if you know what that is, it’s time for your pills.
So the next project will be to install a larger SATA drive, possibly even SSD.
One phenomenon that I’ve never found explanation for is the rapid degradation of flash drives.
I had yet another flash drive RMA’d, this one from Kingston. A couple of them before were from SanDisk.
Exactly same model, connected to the same port. The only difference is that one is brand new, another was in use for 2 years.
Unlocked Exorcist, another support:
Unlocked Ancient Thoread by grinding his campaign node. This unlocks last mirror campaign.
Unlocked Atlacoya with her event. Missed the unlock screen:
Unlocked Volk by grinding his node:
Unlocked Shiron with its (?) event:
Unlocked Hollan from Guild Raid shop. This one, like Atlacoya, hang the app on me, so I missed the unlock screen.
Last one is the first sign of a shift to how unlocks work.
Previously, you always had 3 characters to grind through Guild Raid shop: Eldryon, Archimatos, Boss Gulgortz. Great characters, same all the time.
Now you have 3 more mid-cost characters available each day. Which probably keep me in the game for a bit longer.
Am I playing Diablo 3 again? Yes, I’m playing Diablo 3 again.
Thinking that all classes are born equal, I picked a Monk. Was I wrong. With Necromancer, I am on 400% difficulty. With a monk, I can’t handle 75%. It improved after reaching level 20 or so, after death of Decard Cain, but still, not the best class either survivability or damage.
Got myself orange boots that boost Mystic Ally. I didn’t intend to play summon monk, but here I am.
Then I tried Wizard(ress), the class I played the least in any Diablo. I expected a “glass cannon”, and she even has a passive called Glass Cannon. What I didn’t expect is that it’s a Laser Cannon, not an AoE Blizzard cannon. You’ve got Ray of Frost and Disintegrate that work almost the same, then the secondary attack on Arcon (the Form skill almost every Diablo 3 character has) as well.
One weird equipment quirk that I remember from back in the days: sometimes the best DPS comes from wielding a two handed sword. As a wizard.
Also, first time I notice there’s a lovecraftian easter egg in the Wizard intro:
When I was picking my TV a couple of years ago, I settled on Samsung QLED, because I was worried for response times and burn-in. But since then, I got deeper into retrogaming on original hardware, and we also are watching less movies in general.
And the standard in the retrogaming community are OLED TVs. Everyone bangs about how blacks are deeper and all that.
I was quite happy with my LG 32GK850G. Good colors, good refresh rate, no issues over 7 years I owned it. But I decided it’s time to upgrade.
Since I wanted to experience OLED and had a good experience with LG, picking it again was a no-brainer. And once you know what you want (OLED, at least 32″, 240Hz refresh rate) there’s actually just a single model that fits the bill. And Amazon had a really good deal on it too.
Once I’ve had it for a couple of days, here are a few thoughts:
The blacks are amazing. In general, the contrast is incredible. It’s like getting a laser surgery all over again. 240fps – I don’t feel it. Maybe I could have felt 60fps -> 120fps. But I’ve yet to see any difference above that.
Also, there’s some kind of dynamic color correction going on. If you look at the same picture, the colors will shift for a few seconds, before stabilizing. I haven’t found yet what that stuff is.