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Mobage Update

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Things have happened. I said I would talk about past events, but haven’t. Story stuff has happened. Etc.

It’s hard for me to talk about Princess Connect updates and events. Because, despite the fact that I retweet (and occasionally post here) untranslated Japanese stuff, I don’t actually understand Japanese. Neither reading or writing. Sure, I’ve been learning. But on a scale of N5 to N1 (official Japanese language skill exam levels), I’m like a N7. Mabye N8. Not even at the “can get the rough gist of things without subs” (though good enough to tell when subs are way off). So yah. Slow going. And, as PriConn is pretty much a visual novel with a management game attached, events are hard for me to appreciate. I still participate, as much as I can, but I skip most of the dialog. Which helps, because I only have about 20-30 mins per day to play this particular game.

But there was a new event! Some character goes to school for two weeks, for reasons! Stuff happens when she is there! She makes some friends! A couple of them turned out to be really popular with the community. One of them got a new SSR character this banner, and PriConn Twitter exploded. From what I can tell, she’s not that good, but not useless either.

In Dragalia Lost…well, stuff’s been happening, I guess. It continues to have the problem of too-long banners and events. And since the last summer event, there has been nothing new. And very little hype leading up to the anniversary, which is next week (either Thursday or Friday). Even the most recent banner (or rather, the next one) is a rerun dragon banner, with none of the featured dragons being particularly good – and only one of them being good at all. The only hint that something big is happening this month is that “something big” was announced at the beginning of the month, and there have been free daily rolls for some time. But other games, even other Cygames games, have had much bigger lead-ups to their anniversary: extra crystals, free 10-rolls, extra loot drops in content, and the like. Maybe tonight’s news will have that, but I’m not confident.

At least we got/are getting some new content. Got a couple new Void raids, which are nice for casuals like me. Tomorrow I believe is the new High Zodiark raid, which is nice for esports guys not like me (I haven’t even touched the second High Dragon raid). And last week we got a new beating stick (Mercurial Gauntlet), for the whales and tryhards. And, for people that actually like story in their RPG’s, we got a new main story chapter too, to lead off into the next arc of the story.

Speaking of main story, it was a bit of a let-down. Even the boot-lickers at Reddit were upset. More of a lore/worldbuilding infodump chapter than an advancement of plot or character. Typical shounen/jrpg premature end-boss encounter, where you go into it thinking things are going to get better, but they only get worse. I’ll have more to say on this sort of phenomenon in another post, since this event made me think of it.

Granblue Fantasy also had an addition to the main story. This was better than the DL addition, though it did leave a bad taste in my mouth at the end. It ended the current story chapter, and gave a big lore dump – finally, the/an explanation for what Lyria is! And Vyrn too, I guess, though we knew most of it already. I’m not sure I trust this explanation, though – first, we never hear Mikaboshi’s explanation, just that very trustworthy devil-man’s. And a part of his lore dump contradicts the explanation of Bahamut given by Sky-Lucio in the anniversary event, and what isn’t contradictory is incomplete compared to what we’ve heard earlier. Of course, GBF’s lore has always been this way (and that’s another thing I’ll cover in that upcoming post), this kinda wishy-washy unclear mess that seems like it’s made up as they go (almost certain that this is exactly the case – not that it’s a bad thing, inherently).

But man, that ending. Way dark for this game, especially for the main story, which has been generic good-boy shounen to this point (heck, even Naruto or One Piece aren’t afraid to have people die). I guess an organization that calls itself The Society might not be entirely on the up-and-up. But can this mean that we will finally get some acknowledgement of the various side stories in the main story?

Tokyo Game Show: What I Actually Care About

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Lots of stuff happening at the Tokyo Game Show…mostly stuff I don’t give a darn about. Like FFVII remake? Don’t care. Death Stranding? Nope. I’m sure there’s other stuff, but as I said, I don’t really care. I’ve been too caught up in the MMO scene to give much of a crap about things like new games. That, and the old games going on sale keep building in my backlog…

Much of a crap, though. There are some things I do care about (thus the title). One of those is Granblue Fantasy Versus. I wasn’t expecting much more than a character reveal with another gameplay demo, and I wasn’t disappointed. And of course it was Metera.

Looks like she’s an aerial/ranged fighter. Might be cool. Kinda sad they censored her maximum booty shorts to just regular booty shorts, but that’s CalSony for you. Not that I care too much about Metera – she’s cute when she’s not being a terrible person, but that whole thing isn’t my type (her sister Sutera is much more my speed). But you know, it’s the principle of the thing.

But even bigger news: the Dusk trilogy of the Atelier series is coming out for modern platforms. I’ll actually be able to play them now. I’ve heard mixed reviews about this series: Arland fans hate it, some people think it’s the best trilogy of the modern games; some people think Ayesha is good, but the other two aren’t; others think Shallie is the low point of the series as a whole, while others like it. So yah, I’m totally getting this. I didn’t get the Arland series when it came out: 90 burgers is a lot to pay for some computer games that I’ve already bought (Rorona twice already!). But (likely) the same price, for games I don’t have? And games which don’t get deep discounts? Yah, I’m game.

No release date yet, that I can see, though preorders go up in Japan on the 26th of this month. Also no confirmation of the English version, but this is the Tokyo Game Show, so I’ll expect we’ll hear more at a later date.

Also Atelier related, we got Atelier Ryza’s story trailer:

Looks like the typical “Man, this place is boring; let’s go on an adventure!” seen in many RPG’s. Slightly less used in Atelier games, though: usually adventure comes to them, not the other way around. Might be cool. Of course, I’m getting this ASAP. Or at least as soon as practical. Which, considering my progress in Elder Scrolls Online, might not be right when the game comes out.

So yah, that’s what I care about so far. There might be some more interesting things coming out later this weekend. We’ll see. It’s just so hard for me to care about games that come out on systems I don’t own (which, for modern games is all but PC – maybe Black Friday that will change).

Worst Computer Experience Ever, Day 3

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I think I spoke too soon yesterday. Because Princess Connect did NOT work. It installed just fine. But when I tried to run the game it immediately crashed, and up popped Gmail (only a little disconcerting there, Cygames) with an error message to send to the devs (error 10, which I couldn’t find any mention of in English Google). Didn’t even get to the first screen. So I can’t even do PriConn at work and school, drat.

Now, Pokemon Masters may yet work, if I can figure out sideloading .apk’s. From what I can gather, I have been trying to run them from the wrong folder. Android stuff can’t run natively in ChromeOS, after all. (Though I would have thought that would have been a priority from the start, I guess it wasn’t.) I just have to find the right folder to run it from, I think. Which I haven’t figured out yet. I still have a bit of hope there.

When I finally decided to give up on the games (for now), and focus on the work stuff, I went to download Outlook. Which I had to get from the Play Store (meaning there is no native ChromeOS version, Sad!). Get that going, and it runs fine…but I can’t access my email. Funny, since I was able to get into my email from my browser, on this very computer, from the Outlook online site, with what I believe are the same credentials. But I need some of the functionality of the actual program that isn’t (as far as I can tell) on the browser version. I doubt this is a problem with the machine, but still, sucky experience. I’ll have to contact IT tomorrow to get this sorted out (because OF COURSE it happened after they left for the day).

But I guess not everything is bad. When I was setting up my RSS stuff yesterday, one of the things I unknowingly got was some sort of RSS picker, or whatever you might call it – it looks at a page and sees if there is RSS available for it. Very nice! A lot of the blogs I was following didn’t have an RSS button (even though many are WordPress, which has native RSS functionality, and an easy widget to put that button on one’s site), so I had to either follow them manually (keeping a tab open), or, when applicable, following them from WordPress’ reader…when many were also on my RSS reader, which redundancy was somewhat confusing. And I found an RSS reader for Chrome which looks and functions a lot like Smart RSS on Opera, which is swell. Now just have to see if there’s a non-cucked ad blocker for Chrome.

Also, Granblue Fantasy at least works. Actually, it works great. I decided that, since I was messing around with things, I’d install SkyLink, which is a mobile browser developed by DeNa, made especially for playing browser mobile games…like Granblue Fantasy. And boy does GBF look reeeeealy nice on such a big screen. I mean, the screen has the same resolution as my much bigger monitors at home, but having the game fill up the full screen in portrait mode is something else. Only trouble is that they took out the bottom bar for some reason, and I don’t know the gesture for Refresh (which is like half the gameplay of GBF…). In fact, I was so happy with it, I immediately bought my girl Nio’s new skin. Feels like a totally new game, even though it’s exactly the same as it always was.

Really wish I could play my other games like this…

Oh, and one other nice thing is that having a touch screen is very, very nice, even in laptop mode. I’ve always felt, for reasons I can’t understand, that one should be able to touch the screen on a laptop, and make it do stuff. I guess I just have always had too much Star Trek on the brain. Even with my very first encounters with laptops in the 90’s I wanted to touch the screen. It just felt like the right thing to do. And now it is the right thing to do! Once I get this machine up and going, with a mouse and everything (though the usb port is on the wrong side of the machine, my mouse cable is long enough), things will be rolling.

So yah, while the gaming bit is a huge disappointment, to put it mildly (there might have been some ‘swearing in church’-levels of frustration…), the title of the post might be a biiiiiit exaggerated.

New Things! Second Impressions

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Gotta say, I’m really disappointed with my new device. Well, not in the device itself. More like the things I can do with it. Maybe if I was a bit more tech savvy, I could make it sing. Like, use the linux mode to force a proper browser, instead of having to use mobile browsers. Or how to get the toolbar to show my RSS feeds. Things like that. I mean, having to use Chrome (I know, using Chrome on a Chromebook? How absurd!) is a bit of a I Hate It situation. At least I finally found I RSS reader extension that Just Werks, after like a whole twenty minutes of searching and fiddling (as opposed to the twenty seconds it took to get one for my old laptop’s Opera – Smart RSS, in case anyone wanted to know).

But the biggest disappointment is that, of the three games I wanted to play on it, two are incompatible, and for no real reason. Dragalia Lost said it was incompatible in the Play Store, but I’ve gotten that message for other things in the past, and with a simple workaround gotten around that issue. I downloaded, installed, connected to my Nintendo account, and updated, no problem. But, when I got to the point of actually playing the game, I got the dreaded 160 Error. While it says there’s a connection issue, it’s actually a compatibility issue. Or rather, it means your OS version is blocked. DL worked on Chromebooks until Feb or Mar, at which point they were blocked. Probably falls under the broad emulator block. I don’t know if I blame this on Cygames or Google. But it really pisses me off something fierce.

Also, Pokemon Masters won’t work, at all. Not in the Play Store, period. QooApp wouldn’t even let me download it. And getting the .apk directly didn’t install. That’s actually really weird. I know whoever developed the game (I don’t know if it was DeNa or Game Freak or what) really screwed the pooch on compatibility – it only works on 64-bit systems, which excludes 90+% of American phones, let alone all the phones across the world – but this is sad. I know I have a 64-bit system – I have 8 GB of RAM, so that’s necessary. But no. No dice.

I haven’t gotten around to trying Princess Connect, but I figure it will work, since that’s more platform-agnostic. I just need to get the will to open it up on my tablet, figure out the menus to get the system link, and we’re probably golden.

I also can see zero reason why Granblue Fantasy wouldn’t work, since that works on Chrome in the first place.

So yah, half the reason I got this stupid thing is out the window. I still need it, since the other half is still valid (laptop coming apart at the seams). But it’s a real drag, since I paid hundreds of dollars more for a system that could supposedly also play my games.

Oh, and also, that second look at Star Trek Online was a disappointment too, but one I was expecting. I did the new mission, and I just have to say everything STD touches turns to garbage. Even in the hands of (slightly more) competent writers, it’s garbage to the core. Even the sci-fi concepts introduced to the Trek universe are garbage. I hate the whole ‘mycellial network’ concept. You just know Kurtzman heard of one of those giant fungus bodies and thought, “What if that was, like, connecting the whole universe, man?” while doing various drugs. It’d be one thing if it were just another realm of subspace, or one of the dime-a-dozen parallel realms in Trek. But no, it ‘connects to all mutiverses’ and ‘if it gets hurt it kills all life in all realities’. And now the baddie-of-the-month is hurting it. But they got Rapp for STO, and Stammets’s whole character is >muh shrooms, so that’s what we have in STO.

Not a great start to my day.

New Things! First Impressions

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Me, when I opened the door this morning.

I talked about that 2-in-1, convertible, flip-tablet laptop Chromebook whatever, last week. I talked about the reasons for getting it, and so on. I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow. You know how they give estimations for when packages will arrive? Well, I got that, and it said between anywhere Sep 6-11. I’ve found they tend to arrive either in the first two days, or the last day. So I was despairing, having to wait a full week from the ship date (which was a couple days after the order date) to get my thing.

So, when I opened the front door to go to work (a bit behind schedule, I might add), what do I find but a rather large box! Inside the box was a lot of plastic air, and then at the bottom a much smaller box, with my laptop in it. As I said, I was already behind schedule, so I just grabbed the machine and charger, shoved it into its case, and ran out the door. (Forgotten: SD card.)

So, my very initial impressions of this machine, my first Chrome OS device: I don’t like it. Well, that’s not at all true. I like the machine. It’s very nice. It doesn’t pop and crack when I open the lid, which is a huge plus right now. In tablet mode the screen is HUGE. But I really don’t like Chrome OS. For one thing, the file system is all wonky. Then, I can’t install my preferred browsers (hint: not Chrome), except for the Android versions. Opera for Android doesn’t allow extensions (like a RSS reader…), so I had to do Firefox, which does. I don’t know how to right-click with the touchpad (though I did it on accident several times; unfortunately, I don’t know what I did to do it). Some of the gestures are counter-intuitive (you mean I have to move my fingers down to scroll down, which is the exact opposite of what you do on a touch screen?), and of course I don’t know all of them, since I use a mouse with my laptop now, and always have.

Oh, and nothing can be installed, except from the Play Store. Unlike Android, where you can give an app permission to install, you just straight-up can’t do it. At least not out of the box. You can set the machine to developer mode, which allows you to actually use the device. But that involves wiping all the data. Fortunately at the time I learned this, I only had one extra app installed anyways (Opera), so not a huge deal, but it really shouldn’t be this way. I’m going to be installing apps that aren’t on the American Play Store, which means using QooApp, so being able to install outside of the store is a real big plus.

I said using the thing in tablet mode was impressive. And it is. For one thing, it’s heavy. Of course it is, it’s a proper laptop. It’s light for a laptop, in my experience, but that’s still heavier than your typical tablet. And it’s big. 14 inch screen, I think. In laptop mode that’s a bit smaller than what I’m using now (15.5″), but way bigger than I’m used to for my tablet (9 or 10″). Doing DuoLingo on that…wow. And it was loud and clear, too.

I only used the thing for a couple of hours, mostly just trying to get the initial setup going, like one does on every machine. Once I get actually using it, I’m sure I’ll have more to think about.

Another thing that happened was the new big patch for Star Trek Online. I’ve said before that I wasn’t too excited about it, and I’m not. But hey, free ship to grind for, that isn’t inherently STD tainted, so yay! Too bad the missions themselves are. But I’ll live. I just did the new queue twice (since you can grind for 60 points a day, and the queue gives 30 points each time), and I have to say, I like it. It’s ground-pounding, which is a nice change: ground pub queues almost always are a lot faster than space pubs, and for a grind, this is important. I think the average run time is less than ten minutes, and that’s with it being brand-new and no one knowing what’s going on. There isn’t a lot of running around, like the last ground queue, and no fixed timers (besides the few seconds at the start of each phase, to let players get in the instance). And, most importantly, there’s no cooldown for the queue, like there normally is. 20 minutes in and out, no big deal.

ESO Update: Hit the Cap!

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So, I’ve already hit one of my September plans. I finally hit “level cap” in ESO, after about a month of playing. Of course, that’s just the end of the tutorial. I have to put on my big boy pants now, and grind out those champion points, which are basically just more and more levels. I think the current (effective) cap on those is 810, though I might be off on that.

Even though I’ve made it this far, I’m still running the same basic build I was at lvl 10. Archer, with bear. I’ve got the sword-and-board as my secondary, but apparently that’s a tank build, and I’m not set up for that, nor know how to do that. Would be nice though, not having to wait 10+ minutes for a dungeon queue to pop. But dps is for dummies like me, and I’m probably not even doing that correctly.

I’m currently running through Deshann, and am almost done with it. Of course doing the dalies for the event tickets, which seems like a horrible grind for a fancy horse. I guess that’s how they get you – oh, just buy the event tickets from the cash shop! You can get your fancy horsey without grinding forever! And the kicker is, you can only hold 12 tickets at a time, so you can’t hoard for the next events, if you don’t like this fancy horsey (I don’t – my starter horse just werks; if I’m to get another mount, I want something cool, like a tiger, or a giant mechanical spider), but want to save for the next cool thing, SCREW YOU BUDDY.

Oh yah, almost done with Deshann. Well, except for the world bosses. I guess no one does those outside of the starter areas, or with their guilds. (I tried to do one with my guild last night, but I was there, and no one else. I guess they were on a different shard – Sad!) Just a couple of quests more to kill that chica who started the plauge. Then I’m off to the swamp, to solve lizard problems.

My Gaming Motivations

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Some other folks are doing some “Gaming Motivation” survey. Since I love finding out about what I supposedly am (and giving out that info to advertisers and The Man), I did it too. Here’s how it came out:

Well, that sounds about right, I guess. Although I don’t know about that “Destruction” one. I guess there were only two questions about it, and I scored high on one of them. While I do like me some splosions and such, I don’t go out of my way to get the biggest bang. I’m not that guy that gets the rocket launcher just to get gibs. I don’t even purposely set up disasters in city builders (not without saving first, at least). But, I am the guy that puts all turrets on a small, agile ship in Star Trek Online, just to get moar dakka, even though that’s far from optimal (and, some would say, sane).

Gaming Plans, September

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So, what of my plans for this month? Actually, it’s pretty easy, and short.

First, I’m going to hit “level cap” in Elder Scrolls Online. Not that hard, since I’m level 47/50 right now (when I posted yesterday I was off by a bit; I figured it was better to go under than over). I was thinking I would do it today, since I took the day off, but it might not happen since it’s 8pm now and I haven’t started yet. Of course, the level cap isn’t really the level cap, but I don’t really know how champion points work yet, as it hasn’t yet been relevant so I haven’t looked into it, so I’ll just treat hitting 50 as the “end of the tutorial,” much like hitting HL in Granblue Fantasy is end of the tutorial.

Next, I figure I’ll get some more progress in FFXIV. Don’t even have my starter chocobo yet. But ESO has been eating up my time, and it’s not like FFXIV’s going anywhere. If any events pop up, I’ll of course do them, but I’m not in a hurry.

In Star Trek Online, a new patch is coming out. I’ve detailed this before, I think, but some systems are changing, and they’re giving out a free ship (for grinding, of course), so I’ll at least be doing my daily chores there, along with checking out the new missions.

My new laptop will be here somewhere between tomorrow and next Wednesday, so I’ll be getting some more time into Pokemon Masters, rather than just the minimum that I’m doing now. Hopefully Dragalia Lost will also run better, which would be nice.

There’s no big game release that I’m looking forward to this month, so as far as that goes, I’m set.

August Gaming Review

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I figure that, since I had a thing at the beginning of the month about what my plans were, I should review what I actually did, at least as far as gaming goes. (And since everyone else is doing it too; gotta be like the cool kids.)

I did indeed finish Atelier Lulua. It was a pain in the butt, but I did it. As I documented at the time, I didn’t like that last bunch of difficult content. I hate grinding – or rather, I hate grinding for the sake of getting strong enough to actually do the thing I want to do (there’s a reason I haven’t started lifting seriously yet); and that was a grind. But I did it, got all the endings I wanted, and it was good. Other than the gauntlet at the end, I really liked the game, and am looking forward to the next Atelier game, coming out in October. It looks like it’s changing up a lot of stuff in the formula (it’s the start of a new trilogy, after all), and will probably be janky, but I’m still getting it when it comes out.

As far as starting either FFXIV or Elder Scrolls Online…I did both. Definitely don’t have the time or will to do both at once, but I am. Or at least not a deep dive, making both my “main game”. Which of course is impossible, since you can’t have two main games. If it was just log in and do some chores, I could do that. But the both really captivated me, more than I thought they would. ESO way more than I thought it would. I don’t know how many hours I’ve put into ESO (is there even a way to find out?), but I’ve put in 31 hours in FFXIV; I’m 100% positive that ESO is a lot more than that, maybe even double. As far as progress in both games, I think I’m at lvl 30 or 31 for my main job in FFXIV (Thaumaturge), with upper 20’s in Mining. In ESO I believe I’m at 43.

I also played my various mobage, and started Pokemon Masters. Mostly just doing dailies, or story modes and events as they come up in the various games. I did spark (for free) in Granblue Fantasy, so that was exciting.

While by my count I had 32 posts last month, I guess Belghast counted 30. I think that WordPress has some funky business with posting times; maybe it confuses the time zones? Yesterday’s post comes under today’s date, even though I know it posted well within yesterday. I should probably take a look at that, but whatever. I know I missed a day or two posting, so I’ll take my Gold Award!

A Nostalgic Sandwich

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When I was a kid, I was at a friend’s house, or he at mine, a lot during the summer. Like, we’re talking sleep-overs 3+ times a week. Naturally, that meant eating lunch. Now, at home, at the time, lunch meant bologna sandwiches, with mayo, mustard, and lettuce. If we were lucky, there were cheese slices. Bologna would be the only lunch meat my mom would buy – things like turkey or ham were luxuries, only to be dreamed of. Also, things like white bread. None of that rich people stuff at my house; no, we had to eat wheat bread like some sort of ruminant.

However, my friend, he had real lunch meat at his house. And not the crappy Budding stuff either, or even the cheap Oscar Meyer. No, this was real ritzy things like capricola or honey ham, that kind of stuff. Salami, pepperoni (not for pizzas), other sort of foreign-named business. And nice, delicious white bread, with bleached wheat for civilized folks such as himself. Now, me, I stayed away from that more fancy stuff, and stuck to what I knew – turkey and ham on white.

But there was a wrinkle in all this. They never had mayo. Like, actual, proper mayonnaise. They sometimes had this white stuff, which sat in the fridge like mayo, and looked like mayo. But it wasn’t. It was vile. It was disgusting. It made even the delicacies I was enjoying taste like rotten garbage. It was, as you might have figured out, Miracle Whip. So, burned on this, I learned to take it with just mustard. Mustard doesn’t make a sandwich moist, but at least it’s tasty. When you’re nine, you can’t complain about this stuff anymore.

All this to say, I had forgotten that I used up all my ranch (which I use instead of mayo, these days) at work. So today, I made my sandwich with just mustard. Well, it’s a turkey sandwich, with proper swiss cheese, on potato bread, but still just mustard. Took me back decades, I tell you. I couldn’t figure out what forum needed this story, so naturally it goes up on my blog.