Category: Musings

Switch Security (Allegedly)

Source: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/08/denuvos-switch-emulator-protection-is-now-available-via-nintendos-official-dev-portal

Denuvo – the PC security company fucking up PC games with their security methods designed to curtail software piracy but actually hurting the people who buy the games and forcing them to pirate their purchased software… GREAT JOB, LADS.
So yeah, they hooked up with Nintendo to prevent Switch emulation. Now Switch owners can not only complain about subpar ports of AAA games because the developers couldn’t be bothered, but now they’ve got questionable security gimmicks that could potentially fuck up their games even further, prompting the people who buy their games legit to find ways to be able to play them properly… which usually entails – wait for it – PIRATING THEIR GAMES OR RESORTING TO EMULATION!
Why does this fucking company exist? Who gives these fuckers money? Their methods do nothing to curtail piracy and do more harm to the people who actually buy the games legitimately, which forces them to pirate their games or find patches to circumvent that nonsense. And they’re not the only ones guilty of this.
If you want to fight piracy and curtail emulation of your products, Nintendo, then maybe consider doing things to discourage such behavior. This is only going to boost that further. Morons.

Stop Catering To Nostalgia; You’re Not Very Good At It

No, seriously… just stop.

Every time you try to cater to my nostalgia, you’re just reminding me of something that I’d much rather be watching right about now. Why watch another rehash of Terminator when I can go back and watch the superior first film… or the second for that matter? Why feature Michael Keaton’s big return as Batman in a movie starring someone else when I can go back and watch the classic Bat films from back in the day? Oh, look. Another Indiana Jones film featuring 120-year old Harrison Ford just tagging along for the ride… yeah, no thanks. I’ll stick with the trilogy; that’s more than enough for me. What’s that? A live-action remake of a classic Disney cartoon that’s going to be shittier than the cartoon it’s based on? Why the fuck would I want to watch that?

Also, stop trying to introduce your shitty next generation characters to your nostalgia acts. You can’t do that all that well, either. If you want to do the next generation, then do the fucking next generation and only have a couple old guys or gals around to send our new heroes off. I could think of one show that did that wonderfully. It’s called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Enough with the nostalgia acts. They only remind me of things that used to be good. They also remind me of things I could be watching right now instead of your shit film.

Later.

The Dolphin Steam Debacle

A little late to the party, but when has that stopped me before?

Countless times, actually… but I digress.

So the Dolphin people who run and operate the Dolphin emulator program of Gamecube and Wii hardware stuff made an announcement some time ago that they were going to release their fancy emulator onto STEAM… and naturally, this got to Nintendo, who immediately told Steam runners Valve to get that shit off their service. The Dolphin people tried to counter, but Valve told them that if they want to put their emulator onto Steam, they’ll need permission from Nintendo to do so. Since Nintendo and emulation are a match made in heaven… the Dolphin people decided to abandon their efforts in getting steamed… maybe they can try the Epic Store or something. Have better luck there.

What did they expect… really?

I know that they have the RetroArch emulator on there and I’m shocked that it’s still there… there’s a lot of things online that I’m shocked are still a thing considering Nintendo’s notoriety for protecting its IP. But trying to get the Gamecube/Wii emulator onto Steam and not expect Nintendo to go ape shit is rather foolish. I’m sure some people are sad by this development and I wish the Dolphin folks all the best in the future, but this is one instance where there was only one outcome and it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.

Anyway, I got a thing coming up… hopefully, it all works out.

Familiar Old Terrain And Streaming Trek Concerns

So we’re about five episodes into the second season of Strange New Worlds and… it is okay. Not great, not good, just… okay. This feels less like “strange new worlds” and more like “let’s rehash stuff” worlds. I will say it’s nice to see the current Trek regime remember what Klingons look like and give us proper Klingons for once. The second episode resolved the whole Number One on trial thing and she’s back on the ship. Third episode is another time travel story that gives us another dose Paul Wesley as Jim Kirk, which is… fine. And then the fourth episode was a thing that happened. I have yet to see the fifth episode.

Beyond that, however, the big news on the Star Trek front seems to be the cancellation of Star Trek: Prodigy. Even though they announced a second season and apparently, that’s in the can, it’s no longer going to be a thing unless they find someone else to pick it up. Not only that, but they’re also taking the show off Paramount+ and using it as a tax write off. There’s a couple shows that they’re pulling from the service and cancelling, but… I don’t know. I’ve heard good things about Prodigy. I have not seen it myself, but apparently, that was a really good show.

Unfortunately, I might have little time to do it, since it was also announced that most of the Star Trek shows will be removed from Crave – which is the Bell streaming service up here in Canada. It’s supposed to happen at the end of the month, but you’ll be able to watch all your favorite Treks on CTV… except I don’t want to watch on CTV; I want to watch on a good quality streamer that doesn’t shit the bed with endless commercials.

For the record, Netflix Canada still has most of the classic Trek shows – it’s only missing the animated series – but who knows how long that’s going to last? In any event, that’s going to be a bummer and it further highlights the drawbacks of streaming. This is where people are going to flaunt the wonders of physical media… which is fine and dandy until those tapes and discs stop working and you’d have to resort to “alternative means” of watching your favorite shows.

So I guess the only ideal solution of full blow preservation in any field is to be a pirate.

Good luck with that.

Yes… I Actually Saw The Flash…

So my brother and I went to see the Flash… he wanted to go, asked if I was interested, and I said… “sure.” Even though I said, I had no real incentive to go myself, I did say that unless there was a get-together and someone else was footing the bill, I’d consider it. So… listen, I gave him a live concert playing Jedi that cost a hell of a lot more than tickets to a movie screening. Although I will consider that the Jedi thing was money well spent, while the movie… I guess we could talk about it.

Continue reading “Yes… I Actually Saw The Flash…”

Dive…

Capcom is shuttering online servers for the online mobile game Rockman X Dive in Japan. There’s a couple events you can take part of before the service goes offline in September. The global servers, apparently, are going to be kept up indefinitely, whatever that ends up entailing, but… yeah, I tried it for a bit. It’s a thing where it plays somewhat Mega Man-ish, but you have auto-aim, the levels are short, you need to build up resources in-game or via microtransactions, which I never did.

I mean, the game was okay. Got a couple months mileage out of it on the mobile and even tried it on Steam for a bit, but it was never a game that had me going “Must play more.” I sampled a bit, moved on to something else. In terms of mobile gaming and these sorts of Gacha titles, Dive isn’t entirely worthless, but nothing special. It’s no Legacy Wars, which I did spend some change on for the extra characters and such and now I haven’t touched it in years and it’s on a device that’s crapping out, so… I am over the mobile game craze. I’m over microtransactions.

So look, if you’re a big fan of Dive in Japan, enjoy it while you can because in a couple months, it’ll be all gone unless you find a way to play the global servers… I don’t know. These sorts of games have a limited shelf life. They go up, they get a couple years of mileage, people spend money for trinkets, and then everything is shut down. Such is the trials and tribulations of mobile online gaming… I don’t know; maybe somebody can turn this into an offline thing that can be played offline or something… but then that would be illegal and why would anyone do that… or something? I don’t know. I don’t care much either.

Now, with that said, Capcom did announce an offline version of Dive was coming soon. They even had a trailer for it and everything… yeah, we’ll see about that one. I’d be much happier if they announced a new proper Mega Man game. Classic, X… maybe go left field and actually produce that Legends sequel everyone wanted or continue where ZX Advent left off…

A Week Since The Computer Was Serviced…

So it’s been about a week since I got my PC back from the shop and so far, so good… I guess?

I suppose I should bring you all up to speed.

So I’m doing whatever one day and I turn on my PC. For the record, it’s a HP Omen gaming computer from 2017 – 6th or 7th generation, 32 GB of RAM, 2 hard drives, higher end graphic card for its day. So I turn on this PC and the next thing you know, the fan starts blowing really fast and really loud. It’s been like that for a while and I’ve done a couple things; opened it up and had it cleaned out a bit, reset the whole system, that sort of thing. Fan went down a bit at the end, but I’m worried that it might crap out on me again. Because the thing I’m not sure if it’s the case fan that’s acting up or even if it’s a CPU fan thing that might need replacing and… while the former might not be much of an issue, the latter is another story, because that means dipping into thermal pasting and other things that are beyond my capabilities.

See, kids. I can do some basic maintenance on PC. I could swap hard drives and ram sticks. Add in a DVD drive if I really need one, but when it comes to the more advanced bits that involve swapping chips and heavy duty stuff like that, I would like that shit to be handled by somebody else. So I’m going to find a place close that can get the thing checked out. Best case; they replace the parts that need to be fixed. Worst case; it’s a lost cause and I should get a new system… which really sucks because the type of hardware I’m going for… which is mainly for video production, but I’d like to be able to run a few decent games on there… that shit don’t come cheap.

I take my tower to the PC shop and I explain my problem. In hindsight, I wish that I had taken some video of the fan on the fritz so that he’d have something to look for rather than my failed attempts at impersonating a fan on the fritz. So he took the PC into the shop, ran it through 12 hours of the most intense stress tests and outside of the usual activity, he wasn’t able to recreate the problem. Maybe it was software related or poor ventilation. In any event, he cleaned out the inside of the box and even replaced the thermal paste on the CPU. And he told me that if the fan started acting up again, we could replace with a regular fan. Good dude, smart fellow, and it wasn’t a huge colossal dent on the wallet.

This was about a week ago and so far the fan hasn’t acted up on me and on top of that, I did most of what I did before without a hitch… which is just as well because other than the fan, it’s still a fine PC that performs more than admirable. And it handles everything I throw at it quite nicely. I’ve been slowing adding back all my old programs and we’ll see how long before the fan begins to act up again… but so far, it’s been smooth sailing. Actually, smoother than usual, all things considered. The fan has not acted up on me once.

Now, while the PC was out of commission and seeing that I was going to need to eventually get a replacement to continue doing this stuff, I started shopping around for a temporary solution of sorts. I considered one of those refurbished gaming PCs on Amazon and some of them have models similar to the stats I need for decent prices. I had bought a refurbed PC for my father, who needed a new system because his old Acer was on the verge of crapping out and that’s been working fine so far… even if all he does with it is play dominoes and watch Facebook videos.

The caveat was that this was a refurbished PC from the last decade. There might be new components, but it also came with a bunch of dongles for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; stuff that would normally be built in to PCs today. Most refurbished PC listings on Amazon mentioned something about adapters and things of that nature, which left me realizing that maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all.

So what I ended up doing was buy one of those mini PCs that were on sale. This wasn’t a sudden decision out of left field or anything because I had bought a lesser model for myself a couple years (for minor stuff) and generally speaking, I was quite happy with how it performed. So it made sense to try and go for something stronger. The winner ended up being a Beelink Mini Gaming PC with a Rysen processor, 32 gigs of ram, ’bout 500 bucks… and yes, it’s a step down from the Omen. Obviously, the smaller form factor meant no DVD drive, so I need to use an external… though in fairness, the disc drive is something that was phased out for some time in desktops, so that’s an eventuality that I have to prepare for. There are also far fewer USB slots; a stark contrast to the Omen, which had USB slots up the ass. Obviously, performance is not on the same level (more on that in a bit) and it came with one hard drive, but there’s room for another if desired. I am hoping to add another one on there, if only to have something separate from the main C drive. Because that’s one of the things I like to have is a second internal drive that I could throw all my stuff on while the main C drive remained its own thing. It was actually the thing that sold me on the other one.

However, as far as some of the stuff I’m going for it here… VEGAS worked fine on it and rendering videos was as quick as the old tower. OBS seemed to work fine for recording footage, but tends to stutter or skip frames entirely, which made it somewhat unreliable for long-form recordings. Even on the Capture Card front, the recordings were not quite ideal. For what it’s worth, it runs games fairly well, but as far as recording HD footage or even the rare instance of streaming, I’d need something stronger.

In any event, things are slowly, but surely returning to some semblance of normalcy and here’s hoping we can get things back on track.

BOOM Studios Changing The MMPR Comics Game Again… again…

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but BOOM Studios is doing another major arc in their long-running Mighty Morphin Power Rangers comic book. And when all is said and done, things will never be the same again.

Again.

It seems like every time I write about the current line of Power Rangers comics, there’s almost always a negative slant towards it. I often wonder why I’m devoting much thought to a series that I do not actively follow or pay much attention to. Every once in a while, somebody asks my thoughts on the current comic and my only reply is to say that I don’t read ’em. Outside of the occasional graphic novel – which tend to be hit or miss – I largely ignore a series that left me with a sour taste.

For those wondering, I was on board with the series when it first started up back in 2016 and I thought, for the most part, it was promising enough. A new take on the original Mighty Morphin series, slightly reconfigured to fit in with modern times (but is still in line with the original continuity – or so they say…), and certainly the writing was a step above the Power Ranger comics that had come before, which were largely simplistic and sometimes inconsistent with the material it was adapting.

About eight or nine issues in, we’re dealing with alternate universes and evil versions of characters. Next thing you know, the focus is more on original characters that feel like they were pulled from the worst dreggs of the fanfic litter and less on the title characters – even then, it’s mostly on the Tommy worship because the guy who writes this stuff is good buds with JDF and that’s as far as I’ll go. Then Shattered Grid became a thing; the less said the better. And then we’ve digressed from the OG Rangers to this hodgepodge crossover group taking place in some alternate dimension and that’s when I decided, “I’m out.”

I’ve tried giving the comic a few more tries… but it’s the same rubbish as before. Hey, we’ve jumped ahead to the second season and we did our Ranger swap… LET’S BRING BACK EVIL TOMMY FROM THE DARK DIMENSION. Fuck off. Then they split the series into two… Mighty Morphin kept things on Earth, while Power Rangers followed our Omega Rangers (aka – the other half od OG Rangers who didn’t go that peace conference after all.) We have another game-changing event leading to issue 100.

And now we have yet ANOTHER major comic event coming up posed to change the game once again… and as I’m checking the previews for these things, I wonder whether they’re going to be upfront about this being its own thing rather than try to gaslight everyone into thinking that this is perfectly in line with the TV show canon, which is pretty fucking stupid at this point… because I fail to see how you’ve got this uber-Rita or Mister Vile or whatever she’s called having unlimited power, but she eventually gets defeated and her plot for revenge is having Zedd fall in love with her and marry her?

Like I’ve said, I tried… TRIED to give it another shot, because they got a new writer on board and I’m sure she’s talented and all, but I’ve read a couple issues and I don’t know what new thing she brings to the table. It’s a variation of what I’ve seen before. New threat on the table, more focus on the uninteresting OG characters than the people that this comic is supposed to be about, Drakkon is a thing once again, more shit about the multiverse, who else can we turn into a Ranger and whip up some shit design?

Is it really sad that the only Power Rangers comic that I’m looking forward to is the one that Pinky is writing up? And I’m waiting a whole year for that… and, by the way, if that thing ends up sucking, don’t think I’m going to shy away from that… but yeah, this current crop of Power Ranger comics… happy to see it still going, happy that it’s got a fanbase to support it, but I don’t care for it myself… do I really need to go back to the fanfic well for my PR fix until Cosmic Fury hits? Do I have to do this shit myself even? Let’s hope not…

Don’t get me started on Lord Zedd was done dirty post Z-wave. It’s embarrassing to even contemplate.

Outside The All-Elite Bubble

For anyone curious, I have not watched AEW’s Double Or Nothing PPV from last month (or was it the month before?) I did watch the Forbidden Door PPV… or rather the replay of Forbidden Door. And only because I was told that Tony Khan actually got the rights to Final Countdown for Bryan Danielson to come out to in his match with Okada. I’ll have full thoughts on the show… eventually, but I thought it was just fine.

I’m sure someone is reading this and having a conniption fit over my not glorifying this show as the greatest thing ever… but anyone who knows me knows that I don’t watch New Japan and thus do not have the New Japan hard on that certain folks in the wrestling bubble would have. And also, I have not been keeping up with as much AEW as I would like… life stuff and all that jazz.

I have also not watched a single lick of the new Saturday Night Collision show, thus killing Punk’s brilliant theory on how I’m watching no matter what and I didn’t. I’ve heard good things about the show, but when I heard Collision was only going to be on the TSN streaming app, I said, “Fuck it.” Because the last time I tried the TSN streaming app, it was a total clusterfuck of an app and I gave up on. Now apparently, I’ve heard that TSN did air replays at midnight, but you know what? I ain’t watching shit at midnight on a Saturday night and I haven’t DVR’ed a single episode of the show either, if that’s the case. That’s why I don’t talk about Rampage or those Battle Of The Belt shows; cuz it’s only on the app and that app is fucking horrible.

Even Dynamite… I haven’t been keeping up with all that much. Just didn’t have the time and you know the funny thing, the more time passes, the less inclined you are to go back to something… I’ve been dealing with some family stuff, some personal stuff, and like I said, there are also technical bits I needed to work on. I just didn’t have the time, so Forbidden Door ended up being the first proper AEW show that I’ve seen in a while. Why that show? Because I wanted to give Tony Khan a couple bucks and help him pay Europe for the use of Final Countdown… that was it, really. As soon as I heard he actually got the rights to Final Countdown, I’m like, “Yeah, I gotta get this show.” So, there you go.

I have yet to play the Fight Forever video game… reviews have been generally positive, but I’m debating whether I’m gonna go for the Switch version or go full-blown PC version… also I’m debating going all in now or waiting for a price drop… we’ll see. WWE front… tonight’s Money In The Bank. We’ll see if I can catch, but if not… oh well.