CyberBuffalo Industries

blog | On Artemis and War

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:13:22 -0700

Yesterday I received a text message from a friend; “Dunno if you’ve been following the Artemis Mission. They’re about to come around from the moon orbit. Youtube.”

I had been following the space mission a little… but not too closely. You remember that old Simpsons bit about the family anxiously rushing to pull the plug on the television to avoid being subjected to a shuttle launch? I can kind of relate to that, not because science isn’t cool or the achievements of the space program are anything to be laughed at or derided, but because who cares? You know what I mean, who cares?

Up to this point I had paid enough attention to know what kind of photography equipment they brought along Nikon D5s, which have been used in other space missions and held up well. In fact I think this all came onto my radar because some armchair astronauts were talking shit about how dumb it was to bring along 10 year old DSLR cameras without even considering the possibility that a Canon R5 hasn’t been tested to deal with weightlessness and radiation. As the shuttle moved from the far side of the moon’s orbit back into range with Earth and all its inhabitants, they were greeted with a full solar eclipse! From space! They gathered incredible images and data from the event, including a full solar corona. How exciting! THIS is humanity at its best, on display in real time, streamed directly from outer-fucking-space to my big screen TV in the comfort of my own home. This. THIS is proof that humanity can achieve anything if it wants. This is proof that if there were a god, they would be looking down upon us from the heavens “My children, they ARE good.”

And as I wake up this morning, I, like so many others the world over, are slapped back into reality by a tweet from the president of the US VOWING! Promising! Committing to cause genocidal destruction to a country a half world away. We have been at war, “at war” with Iran for about a month now, and for nothing! We’ve destroyed schools and universities and hospitals and children and modern people living in the modern world wanting to do nothing more than to LIVE! This precious gift given to them from some heavenly decree that they may have the right to be here on earth and to live! It’s an infinitesimally small opportunity to see through the eyes of a human, literally not more precious a gift exists. And we as a society are threatening to and promising to and actually ripping that gift away. From Iranians. From Palestinians. From the Lebanese. So many more en masse. This! THIS is proof god is dead. This is proof that we did not deserve to see the 21st century. This is proof humanity will never achieve anything worth the cost of the lives lost. This is proof that god’s children’s have always been monsters. This is the proof that humanity has nothing to offer.

How can we celebrate these beautiful images and scientific achievements while life is being so callously disregarded? Why should we feel any semblance of civic pride or wave the american flag in support of a government agency, ANY government agency, even NASA? All of these things were built on the gains of the corrupt aerospace industry anyway, fueling the war in Arab countries and beyond. How long until the data collected from Artemis is used to power an AI model that will then be able to target a girls soccer team 12,000 miles away? Shame is all we have to celebrate. Shame is all we deserve, but only if we’re being polite about it.

games | Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:34:40 -0700

Yesterday was Easter and what better way to celebrate the regeneration of Jesus H. Christ than to play a scary ghost story, a favorite passtime of his according to songs sung around his birthday. We had a lovely brunch at our friend’s house. There was Pizza Rustica and green bean casserole and deviled eggs and a cocktail made out of peeps, amongst other things. It was quite lovely, all around. And since our host is a burgeoning fan of all things horror, we decided to bring over a Supermassive Games horror thriller, Man of Medan! Catrena and I played this a few years ago and never went back to it - our original run ended in absolute disaster all around and for whatever reason we never tried a re-do. A perfect scenario for 3 people!

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of these games and as we play more and more I’m starting to recognize what makes them better or more successful. Man of Medan starts out strong with a couple of GIs getting drunk on shore leave, but the original plot leaned a bit too heavy on the red herring of Chinese Mysticism. It’s an overused trope that sits too close to sinophobic themes, even though this seemed to be more innocent than that. There was another trope present that we paused the game to talk about - our friend had listened to a podcast about overused horror tropes and this was on top of that list so she was excited to discuss. An again female body being used a discomfort and horrific jump scare. In Man of Medan, you are being stalked by an attractive pin-up model only for her to finally catch up to you and get old! Oh no she’s old! She’s got sagging breasts and a soggy butt! The terrors of aging! This is something that’s been used forever but 2017’s It Follows sticks out as a big example of this, as they often used old or “unconventionally attractive” women to cause tension in the chase scenes. In Medan there were plenty of en who were zombie-fied or mummified and they were not turned into “old men”, just regular men that became emaciated, but with this pin-up girl, she was also heavily aged up. This isn’t an indictment of the game, just something to keep in mind.

Another thing about these games, especially in a group setting, is they rely heavily on environmental storytelling which almost universally equates to “read a bunch of notes you find scattered around.” It’s fine, better than finding audiologs, my god, but when you want to run around and get scared, having to read a bunch of short stories in between that may or may not explain anything isn’t always that engaging.

I’m not going to go into all the details - I wasn’t taking notes or screenshots - but we had a great time over the course of the afternoon. We were able to divvy up the characters between us and play “pass-the-controller” style. It also gave us plenty of opportunities to pause and chat and just hang out. As the night set in we were getting into the really spooky parts and all of the jump scares were amped up. In the end, we did end up killing two of our characters - Fliss & Conrad. Catrena maintains that she DID NOT miss the last QTE that would have let Conrad climb to freedom, but did miss the one that led to the destruction of the engine part that would let us sail to freedom.

games | Resident Evil 6

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:31:44 -0700

Okay - I know I just finished Requiem yesterday but I’m under the weather and Catrena and I got to talking and oops we started Resident Evil 6. After some xbox(tm) brand fuckery, we got both of us signed in and hooked up and away we went, on to see the adventures of Leon and Helena and who-else? Who knows!

Catrena and I played through some of this game back in 2020 on the Xbox 360. I wasn’t as familiar then with the series’ evolution as I am now, and I may have just been excited to play a co-op action game with my wife (then, girlfriend), but I remember being very kind to this game. It felt so modern and different to me at that time, it was the future of Resident Evil! You compressed your herbs into mints and ate them… like mints! But now that we’re far more seasoned in RE games (and more video games overall), I can confidently say now that RE6 is not a great Resident Evil game. It’s not really a mainline RE game at all, I’m convinced this was supposed to be like “Resident Evil: The Apocalypse Files” or someshit. Or, it was supposed to be an arcade machine. It’s such a co-operatively focused linear action game with lite puzzle elements. There’s a dedicate kick button and a stamina bar! That’s crazy.

I’m not sure if this going to be as well received as it is in my head, but Resident Evil 6 is the most Capcom game ever made. This is C A P C O M with a capital C. Let me give you an example. You are in a city full of zombies and meet a few survivors. You fight from floor to floor with these survivors, then push your way outside and make it to a bus. Once on the bus a GIANT ZOMBIE holds onto the front of the bus making escape impossible so you have to fight it off! Some people were taken from the bus but there are still plenty to make the losses feel justified. You kill the huge zombie and the bus takes off - you’re finally safe… until the bus driver hits a zombie on the way to the church and the bus overturns and slides across the wet roadway straight towards a horde of zombies… right in front of a cliff! It’s outrageous! And it ends with everyone we saved dying in a fiery bus crash at the bottom of a ravine while Leon and Helena are a-okay. Just the most PS2 Capcom-ass shit I’ve ever seen. Perfection.

We’re in a particularly fussy part in the basement of this fuck-ass church and have had to restart a few times, tomorrow we’ll keep going and try to get through Leon’s chapter and then maybe we’ll take a Resident Evil break.

Apr 4, 2026 / 10:15 am

My god this game, as a Resident Evil, sucks so hard. But! As an arcade-y co-op shooter it rules so hard. We finished off Leon’s story last night which really was more of Helena’s story. We were searching for her sister DEBORAH! who had been taken by the secretary of state (?) and turned into a monster (??) and it’s sad, I guess, having to murder your sister who was in lingerie (???) and spawning spider legs. But the entire time Catrena and I just started yelling “DEBORAH!” like we were Ray Romano and my god it must have been so annoying for our neighbors.

I still think this game was supposed to be something else before it released as a main numbered game. Released in 2012, I think this becomes Capcom’s answer to Left 4 Dead. I don’t really know why the leader of the survival horror genre, which had, up to a certain point revolved around thoughtfully solving puzzles while also rationing health and ammo to blast your way through strange locales filled with zombies, decided they needed to take some direction from Left4Dead, a western-dev’d 4-person game which lets players live out a horror movie. It just feels like a strange departure for the series. Also amongst these influences it feels like they were also chasing the success of the Uncharted series - something that I will also leverage against Leon’s lengthy third-act stretch in Resident Evil 9. Here, Helena and Leon are running, jumping, mine-carting, exploding and swinging their way through underground catacombs… which were under a church… which was in a midwestern town … that was just nuked by the US Government. The existence of the catacombs doesn’t make any sense whatsover, the scale of it is too big and it was chosen as the current bio-lab of Neo-Umbrella and the aforementioned Secretary of State. The absurdity doesn’t stop there either - by the end of the chapter Leon, Helena & Ada Wong (who may or not be a clone) are destroying a major city in China as the virus breaks containment and zombies and monsters and BSAA are haphazardly running around every which way.

Look - I know trying to make sense of the plot of a Resident Evil game is a fools errand, but this one is egregiously bad. It’s very dumb! And it’s presented with a lot of over-the-top line reads that feel straight out of the House of the Dead series. Every five minutes it’s some new catastrophe that needs to be dealt with and it’s a lottery of how you will have to tackle it. Oh no! The side of the building exploded and now a giant terrifying monster of indescribable horror is chasing you. Will you:

Fight it normally, 3rd person style with your limited guns and ammo?
Run away from it, in a fixed-camera position, only being able to dodge left from right?
An extended cutscene with vague yet frantic quick-time events?

The thing is, with this game, it could be that or any other number of equally bizarre options. Just last night as we worked through Jake & Sherry’s section, the answer was D - jump onto a pair of snowmobiles and outrun an avalanche. I don’t know why moments like this live in my mind as arcade-centric but they do. It must come from the many light-gun cabs I’ve played over my life which often have you and a partner outrunning and out-gunning various natural and supernatural disasters. From T-Rexes to giant zombies and earthquakes I think the arcade has seem them all and RE6 is picking up from that deep bench of varied scenarios. And just like in the arcade, I’m signing up to see what stupid bullshit this game lobs directly at my agape mouth next, because while it may be stupid and insane, it’s also insanely stupid fun.

Apr 6, 2026 / 11:55 am

My god Jake & Sherry, how many times are you going to get captured? How many times are you going to have to escape? Hopefully, for our sanity, no more. We wrapped up their irresponsible, globetrotting adventure and sent Ustanak back into the fiery depths of hell where he and that terrible haircut belong. Sherry, according to Catrena, was much weaker and less capable then Helena. Meanwhile Jake was an MMA master doing acrobatics all across the land while finishing guys with a palm slap to the face. Sherry should have had some regenerative powers, which features heavily in the cutscenes but not her gameplay. Glad this one is over, it felt too repetitive. I think we’re going to need to take a break before we start Chris’ route.

Apr 7, 2026 / 9:17 am

LMAO just saw this linked in a reddit thread.

bleets | March 30, 2026

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:04:41 -0700

God I love original, old school Law and Order so much. For the first 5 or 6 seasons at least, every person on the cast is just incredible. Absolute cinema shit.

games | Resident Evil 9: Requiem

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:05:55 -0700

It’s been a long, winding, out-of-order road to get here but tonight we cracked open that Resident Evil Generation Pack for the Switch 2, popped in the Game-Key Card™, started the download and made popcorn. Our efforts of pushing through RE4 and the two remakes, RE2 & RE3 have finally paid off - the saga of Raccoon City and Leon Kennedy are about to conclude… probably. I never get fed into hype quite like I had for this Resident Evil game. Obviously big titles that tick my fandom boxes I’m there day one; Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom, any Suda51 or Yoko Taro game, but generally I’m a “play what you feel” kind of guy. But seeing the reception and the excitement around RE9 along with the simultaneous launch on a Nintendo console especially as I was coming out of anesthesia was too much for my primitive little FOMO brain to fight off. So now, almost exactly ONE MONTH post launch, we dive into the latest in the series, Resident Evil 9: Requiem!

Opening up in the FBI offices as a mousy, shy analyst works away on her computer they begin to setup the tone of the game. Grace is not an action hero. Grace isn’t even really a people person. She seems to like her work and has a tough time interacting with others. She is a great protagonist for a horror game. As you come to learn, there is a comfort that comes with a protagonist that can confidently kill a zombie. There is distress when you play a character that is constantly afraid. It’s a cool strategy and with the history of dual protagonists throughout the series, I don’t think they’ve taken this approach before. Ethan was very scared but nothing like Grace. Your two characters generally play out as more of the same just with different ammo and slightly different speeds, or one can take more bites than the other. The difference between Grace and Leon was described perfectly by Catrena

When you play as Grace, you’re afraid of the zombies. When you play as Leon, the zombies are afraid of you.

Grace creeping around the hotel and later the hospital (sanitorium?), it’s tight and claustrophobic, presented in first person view. I’m one of the people that LOVED the jump to first person with Resident Evil 7. I thought that game was great and it may be up for a replay on switch.

But I also love OG Resident Evil 4 and third person shooters and character action games and oh-ho-ho does Leon want to be in a character action game so bad. With him you’ve got guns and melee weapons and they are both equipped and you can use them. By hitting L you can swing your hatchet, and if you keep pressing it he kind of strings together a sudo-combo. It’s amazing! Leon’s got finishers! He’s got a parry! I keep seeing people compare this to Doom Eternal (which I haven’t played) because of the parry but to me it’s also like Doom 2016; do enough damage and Leon can perform a finisher. It combines a lot of what was fun about RE4 but amped up. Leon is old & angry (not that I can relate). This is also especially fun after struggling my way through RE2&3 with zombie ammo sponges that WOULD NOT DIE.

I’ve also noticed that zombies are more unique in this entry than ever before. They are twitchy and move erratically. A fight with 4 or 5 of these things plays out more like a high-frame action movie than a horror game - it’s like they crank the frame rate up to 60 when engaging in battle. I fought off a zombie doctor with a chainsaw and was able to parry with my axe (which now requires sharpening mid battle, thank you Monster Hunter). When that doctor fell… a different zombie picked up the chainsaw! And they weren’t able to wield it correctly right away! It caused them to fall over and he and the chainsaw flailed around on the ground like a dropped uzi in a Naked Gun movie. Its all very chaotic! But the thing is… Leon can also pick up the chainsaw…

This is all to say that I am VERY much enjoying my time with the game so far. Catrena is too! We had the lights low and the sound up and there were plenty of screams and yelps coming from us. Grace’s second sections of the game finds her in a scary hospital. As we begin to explore, we move through light and dark areas. Sometimes she finds a light switch that makes the lights only flicker, sometimes she finds a lamp that will turn on. At one point she finds a hand-drawn picture book in what looks like a daycare room. The book tells the tale of the Shadow Monster and it starts to become clear that something is lurking in the dark. So far we’ve only had to run from one zombie - the police officer that helped us into the hotel in the beginning.

Terrifying!

All of our fears have been our imagination or the wind or a precariously placed stack of buckets. Pulling from those environmental changes in RE7 - a chair falling over, something in the room feels different - as opposed to RE2/3 where a dead body falls from the ceiling or a floor above. Eventually we make our way down the largest stretch of dark room looking for some tool and open a door and BLAM are greeted by a dead body falling through a doorway, trapping us underneath. PHEW we thought it was a OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!

Oh my god

The shadow monster. She’s here. She’s terrifying and she will not leave us alone. Think back to the storybook! The light! Get to the light! So now we begin to circle back but my god she can go through the giant holes that are in the ceiling. This section was much scarier than anything we’ve played recently. The tension of Grace being completely cut off from anyone, the lights flickering on and off, knowing that light is your only chance of respite. It was so well done and was such a great kick-off to this huge, spooky hospital we are about to spend the game in. Really excited to get back to it tonight.

Mar 30, 2026 / 8:24 pm

Just a warning there will be spoilers from here out. I have a general spoiler warning on the front of the games section but just in case you wander here by some chance and don’t see that

We’ve been having an incredible time with this game, so much so I haven’t felt like writing about it! I’ve sure been talking about it, given the chance. I’m really enjoying it so far. Grace is such a great character, she’s sheepish and scared and has to really push herself to keep going in this big scary sanatarium full of giant monsters that want to eat her. The more we get to play as Grace the more I really like her as a Resident Evil protagonist. She’s curious (but scared) and selfless (also terrified) and really wants to help Emily get out of the facility. From the first moment we met Emily I could have assumed that she would turn into some kind of giant lab-grown monster; that cell she was held in was pretty high tech and the empty one had a giant hole chewed through it. The shadow monster is referred to as “THE GIRL” and I just had assumed it was whatever burrowed out of that empty cell though it had not been confirmed in any narrative ways.

The puzzles in the ~~mansion~~ Rhode’s Hospital are pretty good, I like the setting and think the environment is great. This new blood-letting mechanic of Grace’s fits right in and is a pretty interesting way to push crafting forward in RE. Gunpowder be damned, we’ve got blood now! I love that she make Molotovs, but could also just throw the empty bottle to cause a distraction. I have to confess that I’ve been hoarding the high end scrap metal to make the Requiem’s ammo for when “I need it”, a classic RE strategy - hoard the magnum ammo and oops game’s over I forgot to use it. Hopefully I still have a chance.

They paced out Leon’s interstitial sections in the first two acts extremely well. At one point you grab Emily out of her cell and have to carry her to an office on the other side of the map. It’s very tense, because you can’t DO anything with Emily in your hands. You can run, use your flashlight and heal… and that’s it. By the time you make your way around all the walkers you couldn’t kill because they would take too much ammo and the huge zombie baby thats been stalking that wing, you get into an office where Emily needs to read some braille to solve a puzzle. Great! We’ve done it! We’re through and BAM OH MY GOD THE SHADOW MONSTER IS BACK AND BLASTED THROUGH THIS WALL AND STOLE EMILY. God dammit, she took her down… way down into the basement through this giant hole. Well, it’s time and Grace jumps in and LEON. I was not looking forward to crawling around a dark creepy basement, this reprieve was perfectly timed out. I get to do a little exploring and a whole lot of Zombie shredding. His section’s aren’t even that long. I also appreciate that because while playing as Leon is pretty cool and fun, I want to see where Grace’s story is going.

Oh my god I forgot - and I don’t understand HOW I could forget this - but looking back through my screenshots reminded me of the most fucking insane section of this game so far. So we’re in the basement, and we’re trying to find three electrical plugs so we can power up a section of this basement and get Emily out of a cage the Shadow Monster put her in (just go with it, okay).

In order to get this plug we need access it from the other side, and in order to get through the other side we have to crawl around in what I can only describe as a dry cleaner’s carousel full of wrapped and unwrapped dead bodies. You turn it on and it starts moving and you have to wait for a spot to get in and hope your rotating neighbor doesn’t come to life and try to take a bite.

And then it dumps you off into a pool (which you drain) and at one end of the pool is a giant shredding device and a conveyor belt! You have to survive the shredding of all these bodies, some of which come back to life to eat you - it’s one of the most brutal things I think I’ve seen in a Resident Evil game, just deranged shit, and it happens to Grace! She doesn’t deserve this, but she survives!

Welcome to Raccoon City

Yes, that's Leon's Porsche

I am now into the third act, playing as Leon. Grace has made her decision to leave Leon behind because he put a few rounds into the chest of Monster Emily. Wandering around devasted Raccoon City is pretty cool, but this section feels like it’s stacking a lot of things onto Leon’s to-do list. Okay, we need to get to the city center so we first need to …

Wait a minute hold on… What the fuck is with this giant spider? When in the Resident Evil franchise, especially RECENTLY, have we found just like a NORMAL thing? This was a spider… just big. It wasn’t a mutated person that had its genes spliced with a black widow, no just like a big spider. Considering that Raccoon City was sterilized using a Thermobaric Missile, there should be no radiation to cause a mutation. I wonder if they are going to explain this later.

Leon behind you!

Anyway, this section so far feels like a prototype for an open world Resident Evil game. Give you a big map, and each section needs a series of MacGuffins sourced to open it up. There are plenty of enemies here and they are pushing the story along but it does feel like a hat on a hat on a hat. Maybe it just feels that way because we are outside in the day and not shoved into a weird old building full of cryptic keys and medallions.

Apr 2, 2026 / 10:20 pm

Last night we wrapped up on Resident Evil 9! What a climax, the last stretch there really ramped up the tension, but by the end, as Grace, I was sneaking, dodging and bloodletting like the best of them. I was actually pretty disappointed with the final-final boss, but it’s a small complaint in an ocean of praise. I’m not sure if it was just the hype surrounding it’s release, but RE9 quickly became one of my favorite in the series and is a shoe-in for my own Game of the Year contender. I’ll write up some more about it when I get the final round of screenshots off the switch but for now, it’s case closed for Grace & Leon.

games | Resident Evil 3 Remake

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:17:51 -0700

Yes, I do very much want to play Resident Evil Requiem, but after finishing RE2R, I felt I owed it to ourselves to play through Resident Evil 3. Besides, I’ve seen people calling this a DLC to RE2 so how hard could it be? How long could it actually be? How much more annoying could Nemesis be compared to Mr. X??

Right away I can see how this game is trying to differentiate itself from RE2 and even RE1. Nemesis, the bigger badder uglier more annoying cousin of Mr. X has more moves under his leather trench coat and comes busting through the walls of Jill’s apartment in the first few minutes. It’s very surprising when he comes busting through the wall of Jill’s apartment. And they finally gave our character a dodge… sort of. It never moves Jill (or Carlos) in the direction I thought it would, but it’s cool it was included.

Mar 25, 2026 / 10:01 pm

Lots of running away in this game! Jill is really being tossed around and beat up a lot. I like that they gave her a grenade thrower and a shotgun. For these big disgusting sewer blobs I could lob a grenade and blast hit them with a shotgun shell and they’d drop.

It was cool going back through RPD as Carlos, seeing the old building in a state that wasn’t quite as fucked as when we walked those halls as Leon and Claire. I can see why people call this a Resident Evil 2 DLC, it’s such a straight continuation of the story of that game. Even though I’ve been more frustrated with this one I’m happy we’re playing it now. With all those pouches Carlos has on he should have twice the storage space.

Nemesis keeps getting more and more annoying to fight. I don’t love being told to run away from an enemy only for the game to turn heel and say “oh no nevermind now you can fight them.” Unless there is some story specific reason for the change it always feels contrived. Though, I did like it when Nemesis showed up with less clothes and a weapon. Nemesis who showed you how to use weapons? Where’d you get those clothes?

I’m in the hospital now and they did a great job with the atmosphere - some of these rooms are absolutely knackered with blood and guts and claw marks everywhere. I learned what caused it, these giant fucking monsters that look like Fallout Deathclaws. I stopped for the night because I have to go into a room with two of those beasts and I don’t think I can handle it tonight. Jill will have to wait for her vaccine just a little while longer.

Mar 26, 2026 / 10:32 pm

And just like that, Jill and Carlos fly off into the sunset together! I came back and cleaned up the last few sections of the game. I was not expecting Carlos to have to wage a last stand in the lobby of the hospital while his partner… hacked something? His involvement wasn’t clear. I feel like the differentiation between Carlos and Jill’s sections is what (I think and hear) they are going to do with RE9, but it doesn’t make as much sense to make Jill an ammo deprived, scaredy-cat considering she’s a S.T.A.R.S. member. Her lack of guns was never her problem, in fact by the end of it I had so much ammo, gunpowder and health in my storage that I had a hard time figuring out what to take to the final fight.

The second to last fight with Nemesis was frustrating and I had to attempt it several times, mainly because there is so little feedback when attacking him. I dumped 6 explosive rounds into him and I couldn’t tell if it was even hurting him. Some shaking or stuttering or pausing would go along way to telling me if things were working or if I was just wasting ammo. In the end, my biggest disappointment was that we didn’t exit the building through the giant fucking hole we blasted through with the rail gun, which was absolutely wonderful. Thank god that idiot is dead. Unfortunate for Raccoon City and all the whacky architecture, but I’m glad we won’t need to deal with it again… or will we????

Final Thoughts

In the end, I understand the parroted complaint that RE3R felt like RE2R DLC. I did like seeing the environments and characters and city again from another perspective, and I found it cool that if you wanted to, you could start RE3R, play up to point and then start RE2 and it would feel almost like chapters from the same book. You could keep ping-ponging back and forth between the two games like that because they are so closely related.

There were high-highs in this game, and low-lows. One of my bigger complaints about RE2R was the lack of a dodge or any kind of movement. It wasn’t until the end of the game did I really figure out how to use and get the fabled “perfect dodge.” I actually think coming from RE2R so quickly hurt me because instead of dodging, I had the useless, disposable knife on the brain. Again by the end of the game I was dodging guys and taking heads off but it took may frustrating encounters to get there. While there were some tense moments here and there, the game lacked any real “horror.” Instead feeling more action-oriented with some jump scares tossed in. While this isn’t a complaint that I would put any weight on with, say, Resident Evil 4, it felt more appropriate that this game - which focuses around the constant threat of murder from a giant monster - felt more horrifying. In the end I’m happy we played this right after 2 and I think we’re now ready to start Resident Evil 9: Requiem!

games | Xenoblade Chronicles

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:59:02 -0700

We’ve had a stressful week, first starting with the return from the mountains for a weekend away with friends to celebrate a friends’ birthday. With this return the cats have been running around like crazy, just being absolue wild-men starting at 3 or 4 in the morning. It’s also blazingly hot here - as I type this up on March 19th, we are in our 5th? 6th? My god is it seven - days straight of 95+ degree weather. Just absolutely sweltering and really rude considering its March and not July. Where the hell did my mild LA winter and spring go? Oh right, the earth is dying, silly me.

Well something about all of this - the heat, coming home, maybe the corned beef and cabbage we lovingly boiled - caused our adorable and unhinged tuxedo cat Franklyn to possibly pull a muscle or tweak a foot or sprain something because in the middle of the day he let out a yelp while laying on the bed that caused Catrena, Charlie (our other cat) and I to jump. It wasn’t a sound we’ve ever heard him make before. Well he continued to do it and even though we had made a vet appointment for the following day we decided to take him to the emergency vet. He wasn’t getting better, he was becoming more lethargic - something wasn’t right. Well 3AM rolls around and we are being discharged with a bag full of medicine, some additional advice on how to better manage his asthma and some unanswered questions. Frank did not have any indication that he had a break, strain, bite, splinter, pull or tweek! His heart sounds good, his circulation looked good, temp was good! So they gave him a pain med and an antibiotic and sent us on our way.

Both Catrena and I are currently working as well, but not with each other and with opposite schedules. I worked during the day and she worked that evening. I stayed at home with the patient, he was still out of it from the vet so I made sure to sit with him on the couch and keep him grounded. And since Catrena and I are in the middle of Resident Evil 2 Remake together I wanted something to play. I poked around on the Switch, I played a level in Bayonetta, browsed the Playstation 4 and knocked on a few doors in the Nintendo Classics Apps. I wanted something big! Something that could allow me to sink in some hours and explore a good story but also kick rocks on the path less traveled. After a quick peruse of the shelf and google search to see which game I should start with… I landed on Xenoblade Chronicles!

I’ve had Xenoblade Chronicles 1-3, plus Torna & X, for Switch, sitting on my shelf since VGP put them all on sale last year. I’ve always been interested in the series, it’s one of these things that’s often talked about as Switch “must plays” but it was always the thing that “I’ll get around to” but I never made it a priority. If this had hack & slash style combos and action hoo boy you betcha that would have moved up the “must play” pile right quick. But it doesn’t - and the combat isn’t quite like Ys either, nor is similar to that Trails in the Sky demo I played earlier. It’s actually not quite like anything I’ve ever played before and I think that’s pretty neat.

Mar 23, 2026 / 9:12 pm

Oh my god what the …

It turns out that Xenoblade Chronicles fucking rules and has sucked me in hard. I don’t really know what I was expecting but I think the wide bottomed, Kingdom Hearts-esque characters made it feel like we were in for a bog standard fairy tale story. But I’ve been shocked at the story far, gasping and guffawing like a rube at a county fair. I was shocked at the death of Fiora so early on in the game and I was even more taken aback by Shulk’s blind calls for revenge. It’s a surprisingly adult story in a way I find a lot of games miss. But there are no punches pulled here and the deeper I go into the story the clearer it gets that there may be no happy ending.

There is something so modern about this game that I had to watch some footage on it’s earlier releases. I had thought this game originated on the (New) 3DS but it was actually the wii! Crazy! I wasn’t able to put my finger on why it felt so new until I switched my focus to Resident Evil 2 Remake… There is no penalty when you die, no lecture about what you are doing wrong and there isn’t a paragraph telling you that you can switch to a lower difficulty but that when you do you won’t be able to switch back so you have to be really sure and - hey look, I know you’re frustrated with this thing that you clearly are doing wrong but can I make 3 separate confusing suggestions to you in this moment…? No? Okay well do you want to continue?

When you die in Xenoblade - you come back and that’s that. Respawned at the last landmark you reached with all of your money and items. And since this game manages health for you there is no limping back to the nearest town to find a bed, praying you don’t run across a random battle that wipes you out again. You come back and you move on. Incredible. The way it handles health is also pretty intersting. This may be something other JPRGs have done but none that I’ve played. You only lose health in battle, and there are no items to take. You can manage health with magic but that’s it. Once the battle ends, you regain all of your health and lose any status effects. It’s always pushing you forward, never trying to hold you back.

I can’t stop thinking about how much this all reminds me of Monster Hunter. The living, breathing world full of small and large monsters roaming around, mostly minding their own business as well as the little monster interrupting a fight a with a larger monster, complicating things and making it just a bit harder starts to really sign the post card. Gem crafting with monster parts, slotting them into armor and weapons, the vague names for these gems and often confusing descriptions are all very reminiscent of the Monster Hunter franchise. God, it even has layered armor!

In this article from 2012, Kat Bailey spends some time talking about the parallels between XC & MH (vindicated!) but also with MMOs of the time. This isn’t something I’m really familiar with so I’ll take her word for it. She does a good job drawing in threads from other games of the era, games that I certainly haven’t played (like any of the Final Fantasy games mentioned). What I do know is that it’s got its hooks in me, and it did it quick. I’m constantly in awe of the technical aspects of the game. The draw distance is pretty good, the map is huge, you’ll keep going and going before it needs to load you into a new area. There is a day and night cycle along with random weather events (which can be linked to side quests) and each area is more breathtaking than the last. Sometimes you’ll climb up a hill or move up through a series of cliff sides and you’ll get to a vista and in the distance a giant orangutan will just be strolling along or you’ll see a mountainous tortoise covered in trees crawling about. It’s a very thrilling experience that leads right into grand adventures!

Currently I’m moving up the leg of Bionis to he waist in hopes of getting to the spine so we can climb up to the head. There is a fabled ancient race that is supposed to live up there, according to legend, and we think they will be willing to lend some help to defeat the Mechons.

Apr 2, 2026 / 10:47 pm

Since I’ve been on such a Resident Evil kick, I decided to pull out my Nintendo Switch Lite and turn it into a dedicated Xenoblade Chronicles device. I’ve had a Switch Lite for a while, they were on woot at some point in 2020 and it struck me right. Funny that I bought the most portable console the year I went outside the least, but it was 170$ and yellow and I had a soft spot for the looks. I lent it to a switch-less friend for a couple of years, but then it came back and just sort of sat around. I’ve considered selling it but it never felt worth it. So now, I’m going to see if I like it as my Xenoblade machine.

The Party Adventures On

I’m still going strong with this, even though I haven’t updated much. I just went through a few cool areas; the Satori Marsh, Bionis’ Interior and Makna Forest. I have switched out Sharla from my party and swapped in Dunban. Sharla wasn’t keeping us healed enough and we weren’t building up the friend meter or whatever it’s called. I was trying to clear out the Raguel Bridge on Bionis’ Leg and these monsters were just whooping my ass. The switch up helped me get through it and he’s been in my party since. Clearing out that bridge started the Colony 6 rebuilding quests which is cool, but I haven’t dug into them yet. They seem like late-game quests with the amount of materials they require so I’ll check in periodically.

Makna Forest continues the vast, sweeping landscapes that have been standard up to this point. I love these big canyons and giant monsters roaming around, there is a feeling of a truly exotic world we’re traversing. Arriving into Frontier Village my mind immediately goes back to the comparisons of Monster Hunter. This kooky village full of weird little guys? They’re the palicos of this world! And then we got this little Nopon furball into our crew … god dammit. I’m going to have to play around with my party now. I’ve got this snooty Entia lady (Melia), an indebted Nopon (Riki) and a one-armed general (Dunban), I’m going to have to play with these guys and see what they can do.

Apr 6, 2026 / 8:43 am

After a bout of lengthy cutscenes and story exposition I started to push forward on the main story quest. Melia is in the middle of some kind of ritual to get crowned successor of the High Entia and while this should be straightforward she has opposition. In her dungeon sequence the gang runs into an assassin and a Tellethia that have been whipping my ass even though I’m overleveled. I did a little digging into my character stats and looked up a few things online and determined I needed to get better gems and one way to do that is side quests and filling out your “Collectopaedia”.

I did one quest that I started when I was just starting to explore Satori Marsh. A Nopon asked me to secure “the giants treasure” to ensure that it did not fall into the wrong hands. I started it but proved to be underleveled so I shelved it for later. Now that I’m in the 40s, I started back on it and what a cool quest. You have to go searching for this treasure and on a cliffside overlooking the ocean you find it… and a huge, giant spider crawls up the cliffside and surprise attacks you. I love stuff like this, take a normal fetch quest and turn it into something memorable and unique. On the flipside of that, there is a lazy Nopon trapped in a cave and he sends you on a dozen little fetch quests that keep you running to and from his little hideaway. After the third one it started to get old but I stuck with it and by the end of it, you can tell this little lazy furball is just doing it for kicks. Also memorable!

Apr 8, 2026 / 9:20 am

All of these side-quests I’ve been doing have really leveled me up quite a bit. I feel like I’m sprinting my levels far ahead of where I need to be for the story. The problem is the loop of collecting, executing and completing side quests in this game is extremely addictive. I like how streamlined the whole process is. I’m also enjoying running around the world, discovering new locations and completing the map. I’ve leveled up enough to finally beat that Tellethia and would-be assassin which means I’m back on the main story path.

games | Resident Evil 2 Remake

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:55:00 -0700

Okay fuck it lets play Resident Evil 2 - but the remake this time. I’ve had it sitting on my shelf since I bought the PS4 pro a couple of years ago and, seriously, I’m not immune to being swept up in Resident Evil fever - let’s see how this Leon Kennedy business starts. I’ve got RE9: Requiem on that shelf now too, so since we played Resident Evil 4, I might as well round out the Leon saga, despite being out of order.

Welcome to the City of the Dead

I’m about 5 or 6 hours into this game - through the entire police department and out through parking garage with the help of Ada Wong! The police station segment I really enjoyed right up until Mr. X shows up. I’ve got a confession… I hate Mr. X! I think he sucks and it grinds the pace of the game to a halt. When he first shows up in the police station - after you fall down a crumbling ladder in front of a burning helicopter - he comes out of nowhere! His entrance is pretty cool with him throwing that helicopter away like it was nothing but up until this point we don’t really know this guy is stalking us, we just know that he enjoys smashing the skulls of nosey reporters. That’s all well and good but there isn’t really a way to escape this guy. The only thing you can do is find a random room he cannot enter and wait… and wait… and wait some more. I kind of understand what they were trying to do, up until this point in the game we’ve had three enemies; the regular zombie, the licker and the mutated doberman.

The regular zombies take so many shots to kill that it becomes worth the risk to try to run around them. There isn’t a dodge or any kind of side-step that it feels like a risk to do with the zombies but a necessity with Mr. X. I wish there was something more to do with him like hiding in lockers or boxes or crawling into spaces. This feels like it was lifted straight from the original game, now with a fresh coat of paint and if thats the case, I should have played the original because then I could see exactly what the original intent was.

But even with this complaint I’ve really enjoyed the puzzles and atmosphere so far. When I first walked into that police station I said “What the hell is this, why is a police station going to have weird medallions and crazy keys” and then boom you get hit with the fact that the police station used to be a weird creepy art museum. That’s brilliant. I’m constantly thinking “was this in the original” so I think I’m going to have to put on my big boy pants and try it out. I really want to know if Ada’s section is in the original game because her weird infrared hacking mechanic is my least favorite part about this game so far. Its a slow, methodical thing that needs to be done and surprise when being stalked by Mr. X there’s nothing that can be done. So in the entirety of the game up until now I’ve died once (from that first Mr. X appearance) and now with Ada you can add on another 3.

Tonight we made it out of the sewers via a funicular. What a scandalous tram ride that was - I can’t believe Ada kissed Leon! They’ll make a much more attractive couple in RE4 but its still cute for now. I’m excited to be out of the sewers and into the very cool futuristic Umbrella facility, NEST - I love this kind of level design. I’m excited to see this play out. I feel like we’re in the final stretch but then we get to do it again as Claire! I’m interested if that’s going to be a rehashing of what we’ve already done or if she has entirely new areas to explore.

Mar 23, 2026 / 11:22 pm

Leon has made it out of the lab! Fighting William Burkin for the third time was a little tiresome but at least this time we were able to kill it. Now that that’s over we’ve started on Claire’s route!

I’m enjoying the way they’ve remixed the adventure so it doesn’t feel exactly the same going through again, there is enough variation to keep it interesting at the beginning and then, pretty close to the beginning, the differences comes bounding around the corner - Mr. X is here from the get-go. Which I get, but my complaints about him are the same and with Claire its worse!

I find myself rushing, I’m assuming its half because its SO familiar and the other half is because Claire has 6 guns and no bullets when she really needs no guns and 6 bullets… or however that’s supposed to go.

I’m past the police station, through the parking garage and back into the laboratory and it’s been quite the struggle. I don’t understand why Claire gets so many guns but never has any bullets! I spent about an hour with red health backtracking through the police station from the lab because I couldn’t find a green herb. I went through the whole map again running away from zombies and blob monsters trying to find anything to give me an edge, but it never came. I apparently misused the available resources! So I pressed on and got Sherry and headed to the NEST. It’s a cool game so far but Claire has been fairly frustrating.

That's right, Claire, trust in the Buffalo.

We’ve reached credits on Claire’s route in RE2R! This game was MUCH harder the second time through. Claire really had to struggle to conserve health… something I wish I knew earlier. Health and ammo were so prevalent as Leon I assumed that the game would just keep doing that but they didn’t and I think that’s okay. It lead to a lot more tension in the action sequences. But my score suffered because of it.

I think the thing this game did great was throw a lot of tough enemies at you at the moments where it knew you had full health and an okay amount of ammo, and then when you were out or low or on death’s door let you succeed. You may come out with one bullet and red health but you’d come out of it.

I think Claire got too many weapons and none of them were good. I hate “quickshot army” even though I’m a cowboy at heart. For zombies that are constantly swinging their head around it’s a tough weapon to get a headshot with and I don’t think any of my hits ever blew a head off. I think my most used weapon with Claire was the damned grenade launcher! I could make acid rounds all day with how much gunpowder is lying around. I never got the hang of the electro-tazer thing, I feel like there is a proper way to use that but I would just let it short out and fry the bastards.

I liked Sherry’s section and the inclusion of that terrible police chief’s area. There is a note in his office, a log about taxidermy, that talks about him preserving a 22 year old white female pig and Catrena choked and yelled “fuck that’s a woman” and sure enough as you move through the stage you find his lab with a young woman on the table. This whole area was so fresh and then once you get out of the orphanage and into the sewers its basically the same thing as the first route for the rest of the game. Less blob monsters in the sewers but I did get poisoned way more than Leon. I spent my time trying to run away from them because I lacked the resources to kill them. I wish they remixed the sewers and lab a bit more for Claire. In the end I enjoyed it and we’re now one step closer to playing RE9.

bleets | March 06, 2026

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:45:29 -0800

When I woke up from surgery last week, it was the same day that everyone started freaking out about Resident Evil Requiem and for whatever reason, my drug addled, groggy ass brain decided that I needed to buy that Resident Evil Generation Pack that I should have preordered because its a good value in a nice looking package. But apparently everyone else had the same idea. But after 3 days of stalking, refreshing and reloading, joining discords, signing up for sketchy websites and updating my ipad to iOS26 … I finally got one and its shipped. Hurray!

I’m looking forward to checking out the latest entry and I’m really excited to be able to do it on Switch 2. Looks like I finally need to order a memory card. Hmm….

games | Devil May Cry 5

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:45:23 -0800

I’m back on the couch today having overdone it from my surgery yesterday and I needed a game. At some point last night, possibly in the throes of a dream, I was reminded that a Platinumgames developed Final Fantasy existed and woke up thinking about playing that. But I don’t own FF16… yet, so I grabbed the next best thing sitting on my unplayed shelf… Devil May Cry 5!

The last DMC I played was 3 and while I enjoyed it, I’ve still never quite got the hang of the combat. There is a weird claw grip thing you need to do as most moves require a shoulder button input and a direction and a face button. I finished 3, despite the final boss stage giving me motion sickness, and in true form of my playthrough of the series, I’m skipping another even-numbered entry and jumping right into 5. Boy what the hell happened to Devil May Cry? There’s a full cast of characters now? Like the southern hillbilly who drives a tiny RV around and builds stuff, Nico. She’s always talking about food and has terribly provocative tattoos.

Nero and V seem to be the main characters through this romp, unfortunately. I like the Nero, even though his main mechanic is revving up the motorcycle throttle on his final fantasy sword. When they first gave up the tooltip I thought it was leading up to something similar to the chargeblade in Monster Hunter, but you just rev it up and it makes it slightly stronger. His buster technique is here again, apparently back from DMC 4 and THAT is some fun action. It’s a lot like the wirebugs from Monster Hunter Rise but with different close-up abilities.

But my god what the fuck. V is miserable to play as! He’s an underbaked concept of a fighting system and he drags this game way way down. I understand the appeal of a summons character, if done well they can be absolutely bad-ass, but I don’t know if you could ever really divorce the character from character action you know what I mean? He needs to be out of harms way and can only send in his guys, a crow and a black panther. But the focus of these guys is not great. They just sort of appear and disappear willy nilly, even though you are locked onto an enemy. Playing as V is just kind of a bummer. Most of the time I’m getting injured its because I accidentally hit the ‘B’ button which teleports you on-top of an enemy - something you have to do to “finish” them off. For whatever story reason the demons you summon aren’t allowed to kill other demons, but you can? Even though you’re too week to walk most of the time? Its dumb and confusing.

V’s bad enough but I have a big problem with the way this game handles death. If you fall in battle, the camera swoops around and zooms in on your character, panting on all fours, and it presents you with an option; would you give up here? Spend precious red orbs to resurrect? Perhaps use your even more precious GOLD orbs to come back fully loaded with health and Devil Trigger?

Okay - this is kind of dumb on its own. If you aren’t paying attention or falter right at the beginning of the level, you still get this question and have to choose GIVE UP and then wait for the ominous prophecy of judgement to pop up and THEN they give you the option to restart at the last checkpoint. Those checkpoints, mind you, are few and far between, and are not even at the beginning of a boss encounter. They will be BEFORE the last upgrade point, so if you were hoping of jumping right back in the fight you usually have to slog through some corridors and re-do your upgrades first.

But the underpinning here - the reason this isn’t a mild annoyance and is in fact a terrible game design decision - if you choose red orbs but don’t have enough? You are prompted with an option to head to the Microsoft Store to buy more. That’s right, the currency you are rewarded for slaying hordes of undead insect queens are so trivial that you could just head to your online storefront of choice to pickup a pack. They are so worthless, in fact, that the conversion rate is 1 Red Orb to .00002 of a cent. That’s kind of bullshit! It’s bullshit because if the option exists to just buy your way through the game, then it sure does seem like the game exists to sell you orbs. Is that the reason that bosses get harder when they are almost dead? So you could just hop into the store and grab those orbs, you don’t want to have to try that fight again do you, you were so close! It’s basically the late-stage capitalism of console video game design and I hate it.

Mar 5, 2026 / 4:22 pm

Okay I’m done bitching about the red orbs for resurrection thing. It’s probably not as nefarious as I’m making it out but it did deserve to be slammed just a bit. It’s a dumb inclusion that feels like it was “of the times”. I was surprised to look up the reception to this game and find near universal praise for it; people generally consider it the highlight of the series. Personally DMC 1 is my favorite - it sets up the entire thing and takes place in a fucked up castle and has fucked up puzzles and fucked up enemies; it’s generally just a cool ass game that has kick-ass combat. The combat of this game is excellent when it’s just letting you go, but it feels like every 5 minutes they are throwing some new thing into the mix. I wish it was … less gradual, that they just gave you everything all in one go and said “figure it out, chump” as opposed to spoon feeding you new stuff over and over again.

For instance, I’m on the final stage and Nero once again has like 2 new modes! He no longer has the buster arm because his arm grew back? And he can still do the whiplash thing with psychic ability - oh and he’s got his own devil trigger now. And I get it - this is the kind of game where the “story” is there just to get you acclimated to the systems and characters - it gives you a glance into the possibility and then lets you loose once the “game” is done. But for me.. I like it when the story melds with the combat, when it all feels like you are getting stronger together, working towards overcoming a common goal. By the time I finish this I’m probably ready to move on. But who knows, lets see what the post-game is like, maybe I’ll stick around.

Mar 5, 2026 / 8:57 pm

That’s credits on DMC5! By the end of the game I was much less soured on it. That red gem thing and also V’s combat really soured the first half of this game for me. I think Nero’s a great addition to the series and I like where he ended up, storywise, by the end of the game. There are lots of funny little moments in this game that are just peppered in as extra seasoning and I think that’s a great thing.

Is this hat an established thing in the DMC games??

I understand why people would consider this top of the series if you want a DMC game you could play … forever. I went through the Bloody Palace, doing fairly well, I might add, right up until the first boss - it straight up wiped the floor with me. For me when a game like this boasts this great air juggling, dodge cancelling, combo stringing combat, I want the bosses to be more than just big immovable masses. That’s the real downside to me, the bosses are either push-overs or a big huge thing that oneshots you.

But its something you can usually push past. I’m glad I pulled this out because now its in my Xbox and anytime I need to practice combos or want to challenge myself to get an “S-Rank” on something I can pull out DMC5 and have a go at it.

games | Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:49:40 -0800

Now that I’ve finished Resident Evil 4, I wanted to go back to what spawned that interest in the first place, Shadows of the Damned! Shinji Mikami and Suda51 team up to create a buddy comedy romp through hell. And what a romp! I’ve already played this game before, right when the remaster came out, but something happened and I didn’t do any kind of write up for it. This also happened right around the time when Xbox decided to automatically change a setting where all screenshots would be deleted after 30 days or some shit so by the time I got around to getting the screenshots off they were gone.

This time through I played on hard and did not start a new game plus file. It’d been enough time and Catrena was watching so I didn’t want them blowing past the cut scenes. The parts that tripped me up the first time were still there, but I don’t think the games difficulty is to blame. The gunplay is fun when it works. The guns are cool and interesting but get worse the more they are upgraded. The teether needing to lock on instead of just being a precise machine-gun is a downgrade.

The monocussioner - the shotgun-like thing that is trying to be some kind of dick joke and also a play on the word “concussion” - is weird because it doesn’t give you a scattershot, it’s more like shooting a hulk fist. Unless you hit them just right you run the risk of simply wasting ammo. The second upgrade to that where you can shoot up to 4 skulls is useless - why would I want to waste four skulls instead of one.

The final upgrade to the shotgun is the worst part of the game. Lobbing a giant, exploding skull is almost never something I’d choose to do, except when forced to solve a puzzle or beat Fleming, the final boss. Fleming will protect himself with this green shield that has three holes in the top, the problem is the aim is never precise enough. Immediately after firing the skull bowling ball, Garcia freezes up making it impossible to dodge for like 2-3 seconds. The mechanic needed more time to cook! I liked it when you actually bowled or played plinko with it, but that’s it.

There are lots of little homages to horror movies peppered throughout, my favorite being the Evil Dead 1 & 2 cabin. Having a deadite pop up out of the basement hatch & showing the first-person perspective of demon spirits flying through the woods to possess the cabin was also a nice touch. We even get the possessed girlfriend dancing in the woods!

This moment is undercut by needing to flee from Zombie Paula … for whatever reason. If Garcia could run when you asked him to and didn’t get stuck on every obstacle or corner or incidental piece of furniture it wouldn’t be so bad, but failing because Garcia can’t get out of his own goddamn way is frustrating.

But that scene in the cabin was great - those are the things that make me really like SotD, it knows its ridiculous, it clearly had a hard time making it out of the AAA studio system a coherent game but did despite the challenges, and it’s unlike most other Third Person Shooter of the era. It stars a man oozing with masculinity who isn’t afraid of talking about how much he misses his wife or how he wishes he could taste the salad she excels at making. Garcia is muscular but doesn’t look like a monster and he’s not a military man - he’s just a cool fucking guy.

I had a friend that went to a good university on the east coast and in one of his writing classes, his professor - a smart sonuvabitch - would say “no manner of good writing can compete with a well timed fart” and that’s how I feel about the humor in Shadows of the Damned. Johnson is funny! He’s juvenile and insincere but dammit he can land a joke. He’s a good source of information about the underworld and he’s ride or die for Garcia, but he still needs some erotic foreplay to pop a big boner.

Speaking of the big boner, Here’s the elevator pitch for this section - Garcia and Johnson stage a defense against giant kaiju demons storming through a city full of erotic neon advertisements. In order to prepare, Johnson uses a payphone to call a sex hotline and gets so worked up, he turns into The Big Boner, allowing Garcia to shoot huge payloads at the offending demons. It’s incredible. The best part? It doesn’t overstay its welcome and it’s not crazy difficult. Its not easy! But its definitely passable.

I enjoy the boss fights - all nine of them. They are all pretty good even if they feature a recurring thread of “shoot the glowing red thing.” George’s fights were my favorite - I love the the carnival setting and his second, bigger, goat-horse form - both are great fights and feel at home in the hellish setting.

I also appreciated the random ‘shmup levels where you chase Justine through the clouds. Onion Games made an entire game with this same vibe, Black Bird (which is great) and Suda51 just tosses it in the midst of a romp through hell. The storybook styling is very cool and the music change-up is great. Is it a troll to fight Justine in a slightly easy 2D shoot-em-up? Maybe. But I don’t know if anything else would have lived up to the multi-chapter chase.

I liked the puzzles, including the darkness, I just wish there was a path to upgrade your darkness resistance outside of the health meter. On one hand, Garcia isn’t really getting stronger throughout the game, he can raise his health but that’s about it. Johnson is the one that is really progressing, all the gems are going towards boosting the weapons he can turn into. Something like his torch light could shield you in darkness a little longer before your meter drops down. Its a big part of the game and there are no pathways to feel like you are excelling at it. But maybe that’s the point - you don’t get to control the darkness, Fleming does.

And that’s Shadows of the Damned! It has a lot of great ideas, and if Travis Strikes Again is any indication, was a difficult game for Suda to come to terms with. I hope we see a sequel one day, its got a lot there that could be expanded upon, including Paula’s backstory and her true relation to Fleming. Suda teaming up with Mikami again would be the icing on the cake.

bleets | February 24, 2026

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:15:54 -0800

I guess with the announcement that Yoko Taro & company are going to continue the Evangelion anime/series I finally need to watch it. I don’t know why this is a popular thing that I’ve skirted around but its never really come into my sphere of influence. You know, with the exception of every Japanese artist that I admire citing is as a source of inspiration and all that.

games | Resident Evil 4

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:55:08 -0800

I am on a Suda51 kick currently, hot off the heels of a play through of Romeo Is A Dead Man, and while watching a video about the Shadows of the Damned Remake, I almost sat down and started a new file on that… but I gave the choice to Catrena and I think we were both excited about Resident Evil 4. I know I’ve noodled around with it on the Wii and the GameCube, but I don’t think I’ve ever finished it! So let’s hang out with Leon and play some Resident Mother Fucking Evil.

Leon! Ashley! The Ganados! I love that this game starts with Leon basically going on a roadtrip with two Spaniards. I also love how beautifully arcadey this game feels so much of the direction feels lifted straight out of games like House of the Dead or Virtual Fighter. You know it has arcade roots because I’m collecting ammo by shooting bird nests out of trees but please don’t ask me to explain that.

So far I’ve killed a giant sea monster, shot all 15 blue plates, upgraded a bunch of weapons (including the Punisher), solved a bunch of confusing puzzles and rescued Ashley. I’m really enjoying this game, and am thinking about either replaying Killer7, Shadows of the Damned or both. This is such an interesting period in action games and it’s fun to explore and compare them all!

Feb 24, 2026 / 10:19 am

Man I love Leon Kennedy in this goddamn game. At one point, in the middle of a villain’s speech he just blurts out “NO THANKS BRO” like… come on that is such a perfect interruption to all of this insane illuminati christian cult nonsense.

I’m in chapter 4 now, last night I went through the garden of madness, had to puzzle shoot my way out of a terrible dinner party, kill another caged monster wearing wolverine claws and then defend a chained up Ashley. 3-2 was a HUGE chapter that was really challenging and had some tense moments. I’m enjoying how this game never feels insurmountable. It always gives me the option of changing up how I get through a specific area - whether I approach the rooms differently or use different weapons, or just retry the same strategy by brute forcing my way through. For this particular playthrough I have decided to stay with the TMP, the Punisher (my prize for clearing all the blue plates), the standard rifle and standard shot gun. I’ve invested enough time and money into those guns where I do no feel held back. I will at some point pick up the magnum; in my experience with Resident Evil, you want to have a Magnum for the final boss and I’ll adhere to that. I’ve also found a rocket launcher in a back room and I’m keeping that for just the right moment.

There was a moment where you had to shoot Ashley out of her restraints and then protect her long enough for her to gain a key. Then you get to play as her! She’s got a flashlight, likes crawling and setting guys on fire. It was a tense area that was just the right length. This game isn’t the scariest Resident Evil I’ve ever played, but it plays with tension in a way that is all its own. From the way the music drones on, the chanting that begins when enemies enter an area, all the crows cawing. Sound design is so important here and it’s a masterclass in using it correctly.

With this hallway area Ashley was exploring, you have a flash light and are walking through corridors filled with big suits of armor armed with scary weapons and after you find the widget that will unlock the next area, those sumbitches come to life! You know it’s going to happen - you thought it would happen when walking down the hallway - but when it does happen it ramps up the air of terror. It’s great. And then you get back to Leon and go on a couple of relaxing mine cart rides together. Game of the century.

Feb 25, 2026 / 5:52 pm

I really like how this game winds you through the insane lives of these insane people. You start in the creepy dilapidated village, end up in a run down castle, push through the sewers then wind your way through caves until you hop on another boat and end up on “the island.” The island is a crazy place made for crazy people. It looks as though its been under constant siege since being built with sandbag bunkers and barricades all over the perimeter.

There are big scary guys running around with mini guns and dudes with psycho gas masks waving around cattle prods. Why this island exists in such a state I’ll never know. I love how gross resident evil games make everything, they generally take place after shit hits the fan so it makes sense but these are bio-medical facilities for gods sake, they should take some pride in keeping things sterile.

The island section just keeps getting weirder and weirder too. Ashley gets kidnapped (yet again) and Leon runs around some claustrophobic spaces to try to find the way to get her out. There is a keycard writing machine in a freezer and once you escape a new variety of horrible monster you can get in there. This horrible monster, according to a conveniently placed memo, have plagas under the skin but can only be seen through an infrared imaging device. This sets up the rest of the next section and introduces my least favorite mechanic in the game. I wish this scope would fit on literally any other weapon than the rifle, like why not the TMP? That thing should absolutely be able to take a scope. I also wish it didn’t have such strong magnification as we’re in these VERY claustrophobic corridors.

Feb 28, 2026 / 8:17 am

And that’s a wrap on Resident Evil 4!

I wish I was more familiar with Resident Evil 2 & 3 so I could properly talk about the changes that 4 brought and how it steered the franchise towards a more action oriented game as opposed to the bullet-pinching, slow paced, mansion exploration survivor horror that we’ve been told time and time again RE is at its core. However what I can talk about is the time my sister’s terrible boyfriend lived in our families basement as he was “going through some stuff” and needed a place to live. We put a TV down there and he brought his playstation and burned a blueberry candle and I would sit down there in an old, run down recliner, half hiding under a blanket while he played through the first Resident Evil and nothing will ever be as terrifying as that setup. Whenever I play one of these games I’m in some small way transported back to that basement, to that tension in my families household, to the uncertainty of the unfolding world before my small, developing eyes - I can try to capture that moment and hold on to it and that makes any Resident Evil scary.

I’ve had kind of an intense week since I started this. On Monday I had to get a filling/cap replaced on a wisdom tooth. As I was sitting in the chair waiting for the dental hygienist to get prepped I took a chance and asked them if they were a video game guy. Turns out he is! Mostly a Monster Hunter player (playing rise on PC and mainlining the dual blades after being a longsword user since tri). But I was happy because it gave me 1 minute to have verbal diarrhea about my time with RE4. I was thinking about it when away. A few days later, I had my galbladder removed - a surgical procedure that was actually way more intense than I had expected. I had been playing through this game that had lots of set pieces centered around hospital beds and medical instruments - operating rooms as a concept, despite not being in the clean room as I was describing earlier but for this franchise any kind of small, dingy room could be used to operate. And as I was wheeled into my actual operating room (that was more evenly lit than TV would lead you to believe) I again started thinking about Leon and Ashley trying to escape Los Iluminados. And as that anesthesia wore off I was surprised to learn that I was commenting on Sephiroth and his lack of history with surgery (which is clearly wrong) as opposed to my adventures in the mountains of Europe.

I’m glad I played through the original (xbox ported, hd upscaled) version of this game as opposed to the original. I appreciate how Capcom has kept the spirit of the series alive and people enjoy the remakes, they are often spoken of with high regard. And I understand the appeal of wanting to play something that has a nice new shiny coat of paint over it. But when it comes to a creator like Shinji Mikami and a game so highly regarded like RE4, I think its important to see why it earned the reputation it did. The controls for RE4 are unconventional for an action game, especially one released during the generation of dual sticks. So when you first flick that right stick and Leon tosses his head to and from, giving you a peek at his periphery, you begin to understand why he moves in a straight line. Being able to back-peddle, instead of just turning around is more useful when repositioning yourself to take out a few bad actors. Having the option to quickly turn heel and run by pressing down+run is a brilliant piece of control tech that I wish more games would employ (my favorite being Left4Dead which has an assigned “turn the fuck around” button). I think the brilliance of this game is in the controls, and how everything is fine tuned to work and dance together. From the reach of the enemies, to the kickback of the various guns, to forcing you to use long range rifles in small environments; it’s all part of a grand design that works brilliantly.

Ada’s Adventure

I also played through and beat the included side story, Separate Ways which is an Ada-centric story. I don’t really know which game she’s from but I remember her showing up in RE6 at some point. I liked it but it was clearly made at a different time than the original game and the bosses and everything are all shoe-horned in. Seeing why Ada was there and why she would run off in a clandestine fashion was cool. More RE4 is a good thing, generally and this certainly is that. The thing I liked the most about it was the ability to try out some new weapons, including the exploding bowgun. What’s better than having a crossbow that shoots exploding bolts? There are some pretty intense levels, like the indoor submarine that needs to get blasted with canon’s in order to escape and I think Sadler’s boss fight here is more challenging than when you fight him as Leon. But it felt superficial, as if they made it more difficult just to pad out the 1-2 hour play time.

bleets | February 21, 2026

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:52:50 -0800

Man, since finishing and obsessing over Romeo Is A Dead Man, I’ve been reading up on and watching videos about Grasshopper Manufacture and Kill The Past. What an amazing colleciton of games. I wanted to play through No More Heroes 1-3 + TSA before RIADM came out but I just didn’t have the time. I think I’m going to noodle around those games again after I get the (or fail to get the) platinum achievement for Romeo.

I watched a great review by GhenryPerez that I pretty much agreed with throughout. It’s worth a watch, and he is clearly someone who loves Grasshopper and Suda, meaning he not only wants to love the game but he’s not afraid to be critical when warranted. It’s worth a gander!

bleets | February 18, 2026

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:26:32 -0800

I’ve started a bunch of games recently and I JUST realized that I hadn’t pushed an update to the website. I’ve been so engrossed with Romeo is a Dead Man that I haven’t stopped to write more or update any of the games pages. And since I haven’t been paying attention I realized what I HAD written wasn’t pushed live so I’m doing that now.

Long story short - Romeo is a Dead Man fucking rules, 1000xRESIST is a work of art and Chibi Robo is Buff Certified.

I also read through the first collected works/volume of The Crow and really loved it. I’m going to write that up real quick. Hopefully if you are out there, in cyberspace, reading this, you’re having a good year, you’re safe from the fascist forces that stomp around the US (and the world at large) like petulant, unsatisfiable children and are playing some extremely violent video games.

games | Romeo Is a Dead Man

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:29:15 -0800

TODAY… IS A VERY SPECIAL DAY. Today, a new game… a Suda51 game… a brand. new. Suda51 game was released… ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN. WHAT A TITLE! I’m very excited about this, as you may or may not know I think Goichi Suda is one of the most interesting and creative video game designers working today. He makes games that are never ashamed of being video games, they try new things, they make you think but also entertain. He’s great! And today, February 8th we get to try a new work by him and his team at Grasshopper Manufacture.

ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN

Hoo boy, I’m excited! I’ve already played through the first part of the game, the introduction section and it’s so goddamned cool. There has been stop motion and miniatures and comic book panels and raw gory action. I love that a main enemy type is called “white devils.” I love that every few minutes the game treats you to a new visual delight. I’m just about finished with chapter 2 and I really fell right into the groove. The combat is great so far, I have two different weapons unlocked. I went with the “gauntlet” style claw weapons as my second unlock but the next thing I want is the heavy, two-handed attack sword.

There are moments that sit and linger like this scene outside the Night Owl diner.

There isn’t a lot I can say about this game because I think you should just play this. It’s a game that is never apologetic about being a game, it never wants to be a movie even though its referential as all get out, and even when its splicing in an animated music video into the middle … it only works because its a game. A game that needs to be experienced by you and taken for what it is… An extremely violent video game.

Feb 21, 2026 / 1:29 pm

I’ve finished the game!

I’ve not just finished the game but I’ve upgraded most of the weapons.

I’ve beat most of the time trials.

I’m 4 achievements away from platinum.

I love this crazy goddamn violent video game and I am going to start it over on hard.

I love the soundtrack. I love that every 5 minutes you are treated with a different kind of art or graphics or skeuomorphic interface. It’s an incredible experience and I’m looking forward to going through it again and playing it with a more critical eye.

Mar 5, 2026 / 8:53 pm

I dipped my toes back into RIADM today after finishing off DMC5. What a shock to go from Romeo -> RE4 -> Shadows of the Damend -> DMC5 -> Romeo. The pace of these games is like medium to slow to medium to hyper back to medium. DMC5 runs exceptionally well on the Series X - no slowdowns, no jitters, high framerate and perfect graphics. Romeo is less than optimized and can chug when the action gets really intense. I’m not knocking Romeo here because obviously the dev cycle of one of Capcom’s legacy action games is going to have different money than a Grasshopper game.

Mar 6, 2026 / 10:33 pm

I decided to start new game plus today - I need to beat the game on Orange Chocolate to get the achievement. Playing throughout the day I was able to get into the horror chapter, chapter 5 - Atonement. I paused here for the night because I didn’t feel like getting trapped in the insanity loop. I need to play through this in one sitting or else I’ll get lost and confused.

Mar 9, 2026 / 1:40 pm

I wrapped up my new game plus file today by knocking out Famous Intergalactic Naked. I was happy to go through this game again it reminded me a few things I had forgotten, I saw new things that I didn’t pick up on and got to relive the excellent animated music video that comes right before the last chapter. I really love this game, its confusing and messy but everywhere you look you is a feast for the creative mind.

I’ve got two more achievements to get; get all the badges and clear boss mode. So that means I need to beat Famous Intergalactic Naked and the boss rush.

Mar 9, 2026 / 9:17 pm

YES I DID IT.

My god - Famous Intergalactic Naked had been kicking my ass and I’ve finally done it. This is only the second game I’ve “platinumed” the first being NieR: Automata. I found a combination of three badges that helped me get through this and I worked at it. And now it’s done! I’m still working on my full write-up about it which will come out at some point but just know this - I love this game.

games | 1000xRESIST

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:57:55 -0800

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, Catrena & I have been pretty busy the past few weeks and we’re so excited for a lazy day. Of course, to me this means looking through my backlog and I decided to finally tackle a game that I’ve had on my Switch for a while … 1000xRESIST! Often cited as a piece of work inspired by DrakeNier, I’m excited to see what this award winning game has to offer. I think I’m going to keep my notes on this game differently - from what I’ve played so far I think I need to digest this and put all of my thoughts together at once. I’ll check in from time to time if I’m inspired otherwise I will probably just wait until credits for a full write-up.

Feb 10, 2026 / 7:26 pm

Okay look I know what I said, and I’m already going back on that, but I just had to get a few things out because I would 1000% forget them. This game is pretty interesting - I like that occasionally you have text decisions to make… and you cannot be certain that any of the choices would result in a different outcome. The writing and voice acting is working in tandem, they are both existing to feed each other on another, more ethereal plane and I really cannot stress enough that this is a core part of the experience. Hearing a cast, seeing a cast, reading a cast that all may or not be the same, and then knowing when you are with someone new. It can be beautiful and haunting.

The graphics are beautifully aliased. Edges are jagged and lines aren’t straight, but advantageously. The devs know this and they use this to create some spectacular Op Art patterns. There is a lot of gorgeous scenery on display here and a lot of it verges on psychadelic in a Bridget Riley sort of way. The NieR influences are pretty apparent, but for the story that is unfolding before us, possibly a work of Pandemic Art, it makes sense. One of the main characters bears a striking resemblance to Accord from Drakenguard 3, even goes so far as having the name Watcher (Accord is an “observer”). Considering Drakengard and NieR is also a about a rogue Pandemic, I’m curious to continue these parallels.

This is not from Drakengard! Hekki ALLMO

Feb 21, 2026 / 11:15 am

When I first heard about this game I was hesitant to play it. The more you hear that something is inspired by or influenced by one of your favorite works (or any popular work of art) an alarm goes off and the battle between sincerity and authenticity rages on. “Will this be done with sincerity or are they putting as much fan service into this as possible with a wink and a nod?” But 1000xRESIST has been nothing but sincere and has an intense identity all its own.

The first few hours of the game have you “communing” with the Allmother - a semi-mythological figure in this society of women who all look the same - and as you relive these memories the story of the past begins to unfold and I was convinced that this entire world was the made-up story of a teenager who was trying to use this device to process her being a shitty person and dealing with the resulting trauma of that.

One of the final communions done is presented in a way where the narrative exists as text in an environment and you navigate through the story in a side-scrolling or first-person or top-down perspective, depending on the beats (I love a forced perspective shift).

But now that I’m in the 7th chapter, some things have come out, the opening scene where the Allmother takes a knife to the back has been more or less explained and now I’m not so sure if this isn’t happening, if humanity wasn’t wiped out by a plague that was caused by giant alien overseers, that the only reason humanity has trudged forward was because one girl became the subject of a terrible scientific hail mary to clone her immunity but ended up just giving her the keys to a never ending clone making machine.

And now we’re in the future - a big, gross, double dystopian future where the characters have changed but the roles are changed severely. And even less hope exists. We’re now even further in the future, into a time jump, and the society has evolved yet again. We are a different main character, possibly the reincarnation of the first main character and we’re attempting to move on from the hoi polloi and infiltrate the aristocracy.

bleets | February 07, 2026

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:41:08 -0800

I’ve always wanted to read this and finally, as I take a break from the Walking Dead compendiums and TV show, I decided to pull out The Crow collection. It felt like it would offer a nice reprieve from the zombie apocalypse but also usher in a continuance of the black and white comic. Now having read through it twice, I found myself lingering on the interstitial chapters -the poetry and prose used to convey loss and sadness and trauma is so perfectly combined with the ultra violence of the story of vengeance and wrath and closure. It’s a work I wish I had read when I was more impressionable, as I think I would have carried it’s words through scarring ordeals of my youth. But good art can be found whenever, and a small life change can erase the discomfort of the past. So I’m happy I read it now.

bleets | January 28, 2026

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:59:55 -0800

Just as I published my diary documenting my journey choosing photo management software, Apple released the new “Creator Suite,” a bundle of subscription software that they previously would have either given you for free or sold you for a flat rate. And the reasoning for this change is the integration of AI tools (provided by openAI, mind you) and soft-locking templates behind the subscription service. It’s a disheartening move to see the iWork software pulled from their place as “nice-to-be-included” bonuses of owning a piece of mac hardware. Numbers, Keynote and Pages are just that - nice to have. They do nothing better than any other piece of office software with one, now forgone, exception: free of bloat! But the screenshots rolling around that show the upsell to the subscriptions have put that one advantage down, like a puppy no one wanted. My versions of Keynote, Pages & Numbers will now yell at me each time I boot them up because they needed to sunset these to cram all that bloat in, so I look forward to be greeted by this annoying pop-up.

I think it’s time to switch back to libreoffice, an open source office suite that’s been around forever.

bleets | January 27, 2026

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:36:49 -0800

The second volume was just as compelling as the first one! I really sped through it, even though I loosely knew the story from the show! We’ve slowed down on the show recently so as I move into the third compendium I will probably start reading beyond my knowledge in the show, which is okay! A realization I had while watching the show and comparing it to the books; the show is toxic masculinity and the book has much more positive male influences. Abraham learns the truth about Eugene and he loses his mind. It takes them like 10 episodes before they have any kind of heart to heart. In the comics its a few days later before he begins expressing how bad he feels about it, how much Eugene means to him and how he wishes he handled it differently. Don’t get me wrong, it’s full of shitty people but I find them a bit more nuanced with the way they handle their emotions, they admit when they are wrong, because they understand the consequences are binary. There is no more room for gray, they are all or nothing and act like it. I’m looking forward for more Walking Dead but for now I think I’m going to take a break and turn my attention to something else.

bleets | January 21, 2026

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:49:56 -0800

As I wrote in one of the reviews about the games I recently finished, I’ve been completely immersed into the world of The Walking Dead. I’m still on Season 5 of the show, I’ve finished two of the four Telltale games and now, I’ve read the first compendium. This volume collects issues 1-48 of the original run plus a special one-off Morgan-centric one-shot. It has been very fun for me to read through this while watching the show and picking up how they manipulated the plots from the comic to fulfill whatever the made-up criteria for the tv series was. It would actually be difficult for me to separate myself from the show when thinking critically about the book, but the book was so compelling that it just made me enjoy the entire world even more. I’ve been enjoying the art style quite a bit - this is my first black and white book that I’ve read through and I was actually nervous that I wasn’t going to enjoy it, that it would not hold my attention but nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the other horror comics I’ve read do this thing where they don’t take into account where and which panel an ipactful moment lands so sometimes you turn a page and something BIG happens in the lower bottom of the right-most page and your eye goes right to it and it deflates the impact. And maybe this is because I’m reading the digital version of this but so many of the big, impactful moments land perfectly! And it makes the surprises surprising, the scares scary and helps carry more emotional weight.

blog | The Great Photo Reorganization Project of 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:34:21 -0800

I’ve spent a lot of my life, adolescent and adult, taking photographs. I’m a fan of the entire process, from the mechanics of a camera to the chemistry of film to the physics of why a digital camera sensor even works. It’s easily my favorite hobby with video games being a close second, woodworking the third and maybe writing/this website would be the fourth. I’ve spent a lot of that time taking the pictures without any regard for how I use them afterwards. Until Catrena became my number one favorite subject in the whole, wide world, that is. She at least had a vision for where when how & why to use the photos we took together. Now that I’ve got this website and we’ve just had a wedding that garnered us 40000 photos we need to cull through (possible exaggeration) and the desire to use those photos to create something - what that something is I’m not sure. What would be useful to me is the ability to easily browse through our photographs and put them into some kind of collection and add some tags and metadata to help me keep track of them. And yes, this is something other photographers have done for years and years and years and I, without any consideration for future me, hadn’t take the time to do this for himself. At some point in the past, I had Adobe Lightroom… I want to say Version 6 but that became outdated and, if I’m remembering correctly, did not work with Fuji files which at the time I’m talking about, were new. I started using Capture One when I bought my Fuji XT3 - They offered a deal for a paired down version that worked well with the RAW files and that worked great (still does) for our studio shoots and to edit location sessions and make selects and process them out.

As much as I like Capture One, it does not make a good catalog. So this year I’ve spent a considerable amount of time seeking out and testing the software that can help me turn a bunch of random folders of images into a searchable, usable catalog. I have a few requirements! I have some criteria the software needs to meet and needs to include specific functionality so that I actually use the goddamned thing. As I’ve decided to write this now I am pretty certain I’ve already chosen a winner - one piece of software felt as though it was a large step above the rest.

Criteria

So what does this need to do? First and foremost I must be able to access the catalog from my laptop but work on photos that are on a networked drive. Last year also saw me rebuilding my office mac mini into a all new home server and I now have around 40tbs of direct attached storage. I rarely sit at my desk downstairs to do computer work - I’m a laptop guy and will use it all around the house so this is a necessity. Other requirements?

A detailed taggin system including nested tags
Some kind of virtual album or collection where photos across albums can be stored together
A folder structure - this isn’t essential but since I’m organizing my photos by year and then “event” in the finder I’d like to be able to stay organized in a similar way.
No “importing.” Lightroom made you import your photos and it would move them to it’s own database. This is bad!
a layout that at least feels a little familiar. The closer to Capture One with the way it lays out the editing tools, the better.
It needs to work. What do I mean by that? I need to like the way it renders photos, I need to be able to move through the interface quickly, it needs to stay out of its own way.
Little to no AI integration. Look, I understand this is the direction the world is going, at least until the entire system implodes in on itself, but I don’t want that shit touching my photographs. So if your system if boasting AI for cropping, white balance or anything really simple? Disqualified!

So lets check out what I fooled around with. If you are interesting in taking control of how you organize your photos or want to move (further) away from the Adobe teet, you may find this interesting or at the very least, a faint guiding light in an endless ocean of options. I’m not going into tutorials nor will I go particularly in-depth on any of these, but talk about them just enough to get a general impression.

Tonfotos

The first thing I tried was Tonfotos. It’s a plucky little photo and video catalog program that analyzes every photo in your chosen directory and lets you do some cool sorting options. There is also an option to detect faces and sort by people which seemed to work okay. The first problem with this was the hefty ingestion period. I think it took over a week to get thumbnails made for the folder. This was pretty unnecessary because I dont need this to happen all at once, doing it when I open that folder would make more sense and be less resource intensive, at least all up front. So after a week or more of this thing running away, I was finally able to use it and it did work well. I had some issues with the way it parsed the folders and, as this was the first try of many to come I hadn’t fleshed out my requirements fully, there was no real photo editing. You could rotate which was nice but that’s about it. You are able to make favorites and albums, which is nice, but the tagging features were rudimentary. There is a hefty reliance on exif and metadata for dates, times and locations - there are sorting features based on all of these. All in all, it’s okay software if you really want to quickly access a large group of pictures in chronological order and sort by faces.

XnView MP

XnSoft is a company that makes a handful of specialty, image related software, one of them being XnView MP. It’s hard to classify, as we’ll get into, but at it’s most basic description, it’s a fine piece of photo management programming. It let’s you browse through folders and it will create thumbnails for each. It reads metadata and lets you assign custom tags. Spoiler alert- this software has the most versatile and fastest tagging component out of any of the software that I’ve tried. For a while I was going to rely just on this software to manage my grand catalog even though it falls short in a lot of other (important) areas. Ultimately I kept going in my search because where it falls short is the image editing and manipulation. It works closer to something like Photoshop when it comes to options for adjusting parameters. Double clicking an image will open it in a new view. From the image drop down menu you have your choices for editing. It’s all very basic stuff but you can assign a curve profile, edit the exposure and white balance, cropping, rotation etc. It’s absolutely fine for a single edit every once in a while. It’s not non-destructive and you have to save each edit as their own image when you’re done. This means you can’t make tweaks and you can’t share profiles between images, it’s really not that kind of program. But it parses and displays literally ever format I’ve thrown at it, including affinity project files and HEIC. I think this is going to stay on my computer because I do find it useful but really, the search continues!

digikam

The first entry in the open-source image editors, digikam is a full featured RAW photo editor. It features non-destructive edits, tags and labels, album creation and pretty good RAW photo development. The icing on the cake for digikam is the fact that it’s open source and free. It has a lot going for it but there were a few things that held me back from signing on with digikam for the long term. First, I don’t like the way the software separates itself into three sections; image editor, light table and album view. Album view is the default, and it lets you look through the folders you’ve imported. This is the second issue. You have to import a folder through the settings menu which is inconvenient. It also had a hard time keeping those folders linked to the network drives so I’d have to go in and re-add after being away from the program for a while. And third, the big one, there is no custom tags. You can give individual photos a star rating but that’s about it. There are some useful views that can be setup in digikam, including a timeline and “by date”. There is also a duplicate and similar photo section which seems promising but I did not spend a lot of time messing around with.

RawTherapee

I generally like the way RawTherapee works. It’s a good, open source program that has a lot of functionality and some customization. There are some labeling options like stars and colors, it lets you navigate to any folder you want willy-nilly without the need to do an import and it generally operates well. The color enhancement sliders move quick, the previews render fast and it has an intuitive layout. It would be catalog of choice if it just had custom labels and metadata. There are no custom tags in this program whatsoever. It’s actually a huge bummer because it works really well and doesn’t have a lot of fluff. But without being able to add labels and tags and organize photos into a collection or albums, it becomes little more than a pretty good photo editor. And I have those in spades. There was a moment where I was considering using both XnView MP and RawTherapee in conjunction with one another, which honestly wouldn’t be a terrible setup, but I’m convinced there were better options out there.

darktable

darktable is another open source raw photo editor and manager and a pretty good one, too. When you get started with darktable, you have to add images by folders, and it does not work recursively. Honestly the way darktable handles images, folders and collections is the reason I’m not going to stick with it. It’s actually kind of hard to explain but it wants you to create filters to make custom albums. For instance, if say you went on a vacation from May 1st to May 10th, and all of your photos exif data were correct, you could save a filter under the name “Vacation” and assign it to include only photos taken between those dates. You can combine criteria as well to make very specific filters. But! This is not how my brain works, and I’m not only cataloging photos taken with a modern digital camera, sometimes my exif data is a mess or non-existant! And I would rather be able to look at a list of nested folders, that’s the quickest way for me to find anything on a computer. That or by name, but that doesn’t really work for digital photographs out of a camera, either. Not without properly renaming everything. The other thing about darktable that put me off was how complicated all of the adjustments are. There are plenty of adjustments that are standard across programs; white balance, exposure, contrast, curves, etc. But darktable includes some crazy specific adjustments that mostly serve to clutter up its interface. I think there should be a happy medium between form and function. Also anyone reading this - there is a setting that will stop scroll from affecting the sliders and will just scroll through the modules instead. Finding this drastically increased the applications usability for me.

DxO PhotoLab

I don’t even know how I found this one, looking around a reddit thread where people were talking about breaking the adobe chains, maybe. But I looked it up and downloaded the demo of DxO Photo Lab 9! It’s excellent and I love it. It took me a minute to move the modules around to resemble something that I enjoyed using but after a while I was able to get things setup with my film strip on the bottom, the folders on the left and the adjustments to the right. It allows for custom workspaces as well, which is a nice feature. Nothing needs to be imported, but it will need to generate thumbnails. DxOPL allows for custom tags, as well as hierarchal tags which will render into a nested list. For instance if I want to add something complicated like a country, state and city, you can write it out like United States > California > Los Angeles and it will correctly parse that. The image rendering is excellent; the adjustments that are present feel more like I’m using Capture One than anything else, which is helpful. I found myself working through 2 or 3 sets of photos in DxO in the time it would have taken me to edit just a couple of images in any of the other programs. I found I needed less adjustments to get a photo tuned up in this, if that makes any sense at all. In RawTherapee it felt like I was hunting & pecking and with DxO, I was typing 100 wpm. Okay problem solved, right? What’s the catch? Well that catch is this program costs 239.99. That’s steep! I understand that software costs money and I’m no stranger to supporting companies, begrudgingly and happily, but the thing that’s stopped me from pulling the trigger is two-fold. One, I wanted to really really really really really make sure this is the program that I’m going to spend hours and hours and hours of my life building data in. Is this going to stand the test of time? What happens if this company goes under in a few years, will I be able to migrate that data away from this? My photos are my photos but that metadata, those albums and collections, this is the stuff that I’m going to be making within DxO and I really want to be sure this will be worth it. DxO seems to be solid enough, you never know with tech companies these days though so caution is always good. Secondly, everywhere I looked I saw that there were massive black friday sales… so I feel like it would be okay to wait until this year’s sale to purchase it… if they offer deals I want the deal, so waiting a few months before I upgrade seems okay.

Honorable Mentions

Before I wrap this up, because I feel like I’ve been writing this for weeks, but there were more programs that I checked out that I thought felt worth mentioning. Most of these I spent very little time in because they were obviously not for me, right out the gate. But there are some interesting options and I figure why not.

RapidRAW

If I just needed an ultra fast, simple workflow, RapidRAW would be top of my list. It lets you browse to a folder and make some adjustments to the raw files and export. It’s very quick and clean but that’s about all it offers.

NegPy

Something I saw on reddit, NegPy is built for processing film negatives. Its young and just starting out, worth keeping an eye on to see if it flourishes into something more robust. It is, however, off to a promising start!

Nitro

This program, Nitro lets you choose either your Apple Photos library or self-organized photos on the finder. It has a focus on comparison which I found interesting. Nitro doesn’t seem to like dealing with photos on the network, lots of spinning beach balls while waiting for adjustments to load in. It did also crash once. It seems like a competent piece of software but the interface has too much of a consumer feel to it, even though the image rendering was professional and clean.

Eagle

There is a program called Eagle that people seem to like, it feels more like a replacement for Adobe Bridge, probably the best piece of software that company ever made. I could see myself using something like this in the future but for now I don’t think I’m even going to bother with it - it is NOT photography focused and it doesn’t seem like you can use it to develop photos. I could see this being useful if I really cannot find the perfect all in one photography catalog application, but at that point I’d still probably just rather use XnViewMP.

Photomator

I remembered, last year, hearing that Apple had purchased some photo editing software - Pixelmator and Photomator - both were held in high regard. Pixelmator seems to be really into the AI bubble and has a big focus on vector graphics. Photomator however, has been billed at “the Perfect Lightroom replacement” and has a free trial. I was incredibly disappointed when I first booted this up because it looks just like Photos.app. Like just like it. It integrates with your iPhoto library and that seems to be the only way to get photos in or out. The photo editing is very similar as well, this one was also not for me.

Final Thoughts

What started out as a “I need to get my digital life in order” ended up with me writing a dozen quick reviews about software, I didn’t really see that coming. Just like in real life, I think keeping things organized digitally is easier if you “have a place” for them to go. And sometimes organization doesn’t just mean a folder on a hard drive. I have been working through my setup top-to-bottom. I’m getting backups properly sorted (finally working on the 3-2-1!), I’ve got power management to deal with, I think I want to upgrade my router to some kind of modern wi-fi spec (I’m running an older TP-Link). But if my photos are organized and I know how to properly use them, then I will be able to continue to grow as a photographer, I will be able to look through a digital collection and see progress, or identify the things I like and want to do differently. I’ll be able to share with friends and family and this website easier; notice I haven’t updated a gallery in quite a long time? Up until this point I had been using Apple Photos to organize my film scans and it got out of hand. I’m hoping to be able to keep track of my analog photos better, know what camera shot what and on which film stock, something I’d love to add to the website as well. But I need to have that information easily at hand, and I think using DxO Photo Lab is going to help make that happen. So wish me luck, I’m sure I’ll continue to talk about this either with another blog post or in the /bleets section. And as always, if you found this interesting or useful let me know by dropping me an email.

games | The Walking Dead Season 2

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:14:40 -0800

Catrena and I are steeping hard in The Walking Dead franchise, right now, as we’re almost to the end of Season 4. It’s raining today and after a few bouts of chores around the house we decided to settle in and start Season 2 of the game.

Right away the tone of this season is much more grim than the beginning of the first. The father of our pregnant traveling companion is shot in a bathroom robber gone bad, we learn that our Christa loses her baby and we have the option to kill a dog we once played fetch with. It’s a rough start! It feels as though the devs were trying to really impress upon us, the players, that though you are playing as a child, young Clementine, this is not a world of innocence. No punchers were held, everything is full force. And by god is it ever. From those first few moments to the decisions that lead to us having to sew up our own wound, it’s a strong opener. My biggest complaint so far is they’ve not introduced us to any characters that I particularly care about, other than Clementine. The denizens of the house we are brought to all seem to hate each other and can be hard to tell apart. Though I understand in these troubling times that you may not be a bastion of friendliness, I still need to care about these people. On to Episode 2!

Jan 15, 2026 / 7:35 pm

When I said we steeped ourselves into this hard I wasn’t joking. We’re currently at the end of Season 5 of the TV show (gulp!) and we finished this season of the game. Season 2, to me, had a lot more downs than ups. I think I brushed on this the last time I wrote about it but in order for this kind of game to work for me you need to give me characters that I like. And this season wasn’t full of very many likable people. They don’t always have to be GOOD people, right? And a theme of these “do what we need to survive” shows is often the line that is walked between good & evil; the moral quandary of watching out for yours and stepping on anyone that gets in the way. Season 2 starts us off with the hard hitting choice of whether or not we should try to feed a dog and that dog immediately turns on Clem and attacks her, forcing her to put it down.

That’s a tough choice for a child to make! And it’s a tough choice for a lot of people to make because the human race loves to make dogs out to be this angelic foil that should never be on the receiving end of harm no matter what… and it’s a tough choice! Then you get tossed into a group of some of the most unlikable characters and, for me, that ambiguity goes away! These are not puppy-eyed, likeable creatures! These are adults that throw a little girl into a shed to bleed out. They force her to sew up her own arm after cleaning it with medical supplies she had to steal because they would offer her no aid. No matter what happens after this, that’s the taste that I had in my mouth of this group. They were clearly hiding something and CONSTANTLY bickering, so my investment in their safety was very low.

I did like this quick story beat about taking a polaroid picture Clem and her new friend, Sarah.

It turns out that bickering would never cease! They go on to do that the entire game. People will get added to the group, others will leave, some will die, but the constant between them is that anything that needs to be discussed, no matter how important or mundane, will end with everyone yelling and screaming at each other. It was kind of annoying! I’m a fairly level-headed person, I have my passions and my values but I can also be a diplomat, through and through, so hearing people fly off the handle at the drop of a hat when what you need to do is apply reason and compassion is extremely challenging for me. Most of the conflicts in this game could be resolved if just one side let off the gas even a little. To see the writing come down to cosntantly needing to pick a side in a verbal fight between one side or the other wore thin by the end of the last chapter, especially since the final thing you were tasked with is - yup, you guessed it - choosing between two people who were arguing. The choice is much heavier, and we chose to shoot Kenny because my god he was being so unreasonable but the more I sat with it - ESPECIALLY after the reveal that AJ was alive and well - I wish I blew Jane away, I shouldn’t even have hesitated! That was such a fucking stupid thing to do, Jane, after I sided with you! This wish also applies to Arvo. Fuck Arvo!

Man, seriously, fuck Arvo

It was nice to see that Clem had some real character development, and by the end of this game she was just as fed up with everyone’s bullshit as I was. She’s a great character and I really wish they had put her as the lead of the next game, which hasn’t been on sale yet so we have not played it. I think the trials and tribulations with Telltale could have taken the wind from the lungs of these beloved games, but so far we’ve been enjoying them enough that we’ve put ourselves through TWO, heart wrenching decisions and all. I am glad we played them, we still call back to these games and discuss the outcomes and what could have been done differently. The first season was easily better than this one, with a better story, more likable characters (RIP Lee) and a far more rounded out world of decisions, but the second one kept us invested even if we didn’t love everyone and everything.

games | The Walking Dead: Season 1

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 12:54:51 -0800

Oh god dammit. Jesus my god what the fuck?

After we finished Little Hope we kept the ball rolling and bought Seasons 1, 2 & 3 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I think I played a demo of this on the iPad years ago but outside of that I’ve seen some interent memes with Clem but that’s about it. Sometimes I’m surprised that things that have been around forever have not been spoiled for me and man, oh my god jesus this game wasn’t spoiled but fuck me is this heart wrenching.

I had every intention of documenting our progress of this game after each chapter but the day got away from us and still in our post-christmas, “I don’t wanna grow up” millennial Toys-R-Us haze, we rolled straight through the entire thing on this lazy Saturday. First off, I love how much control it feels like your decisions have. Going from a DPA game to this and I think Telltale uses the interpersonal relationships so much better. When you lie or attempt to deceive or raise your voice the characters take note and boy will they throw that shit right back in your face. The cast of characters here is pretty interesting, I’ve been a fan of the show so seeing some of those characters pop in and out of the story is cool, it has the effect the execs at Marvel think seeing a random comic character appear in a 30 second post-credit sequence would have.

Since we’ve ploughed through all five of these episodes today, I’m going to highlight some of our choices and how we felt about them. When we play the next season, and it’s already loaded up on the switch, I’ll try to keep better notes but we were only-game-nothing-else today.

In the first episode we saved Duck, which caused the death of Hershel’s son Shawne. This pushed us out of the farma and into the truck with Kenny. When we get to the pharmacy we choose to defend Duck which put us on the bad side of Lenny immediately. Lenny was such a piece of shit my god. I’ve worked with guys like that and what hell it must be to have to go through the apocalypse with them.

In the second episode I felt bad about putting the pitchfork through that farm brother but only because Clem was watching and we hadn’t a chance to talk about it before hand. We left his other brother alive when all was said and done, but since his momma and about 100 other walkers were heading towards him I don’t think they lasted too long.

We did choose to loot the station wagon because if you flea your vehicle with the keys in it, leaving the lights on and doors open in the middle of the trail… your car is going to get looted. Had it been pulled off the trail and kept even slightly incognito it would have been fine. That should been the lesson, not that it’s wrong to take a random sweatshirt.

Okay here’s the real takeaway - as soon as Chuck (Charles) showed up we decided we needed to protect him at all costs. He was the best character and the one we wanted to see go the distance so I’m disappointed that his death felt so pointless, all he did was save Ben who would cut and run at every turn.

Completely blindsided that Vernon decided to steal our boat, I did not see that coming. Also Catrena and I were convinced he was voiced by either Stan Lee or Larry King, both are dead now but I think they were still alive when this game was first made.

VERY upset that this station wagon freak blew up the entire group and caused Lee to get bit. That final scene with Lee and Clem in the jewelry store was heart wrenching, incredibly brutal. The writing in this game has truly been excellent.

The controls and QTE are easy to use and easy to adapt to, in fact we never had a problem with pulling off any of the action. There were plenty of times we died but that was because we either didn’t understand the assignment or the action was quick or we made the wrong decision, but never because the controls themselves were confusing and hard to use.

I’m very sorry that cutting off Lee’s arm did not save him. I had a feeling it was too late when he passed out by the elevator but goddamn if I weren’t going to try. Clem didn’t deserve this (nobody deserves this) and I wanted to do everything to see that her and Lee were kept together as long as possible but in the end death comes for us all and it came for Lee.

bleets | December 26, 2025

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:06:53 -0800

Merry Christmas from CyberBuffalo & AbraCatrena! Each year we do a Halloween and Christmas card and this year I decided to do a little breakdown on how we made it. Our cards are GENERALLY made up of multiple photos that I will comp together using Affinity Photo, this is generally because we’re only 2 people and photographing cats is hard.

games | Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 22:58:42 -0800

Merry merry! It’s Christmas today and part of the fun is Christmas, for us anyway, is eating a big breakfast, knocking back a bottle of bubbly with a hint of orange juice and staying in your pajamas all day while fiddling with your presents. And when we want a change from all that fiddling we turn to our favorite friend, video games. This year we didn’t see any games under the tree but while browsing the eShop for sales we saw The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope was on sale and not to disappoint Andy Williams who always reminds us that Christmas time brings “scary ghost stories” we decided today would be the perfect day to knock our way through this game.

Catrena and I really enjoy these games. It all started a some years ago when we played through Until Dawn with a few friends during Halloween time. The mixture of choose your own adventure, point-and-click and tense QTEs really do just tickle our fancy. Something great the DPA games do is allow you to divvy up the characters to a specific player. Since we’ve never played this one before we just went off gut and tried to choose people we thought looked interesting not knowing how and if they they’d be grouped up. Sometimes this can lead to one player getting stuck on a big run - say you chose three characters and then they get stuck together in one chapter and the game goes from one to the next to the last, player 1 will play through all three of those. I dont think this is a problem, even during intense moments because it makes those moments more intense; the stress compounds!

I liked this story! It takes place in rural Massachussetts and opens with a foster family complaining about one another. Soon it becomes clear that the youngest ain’t quite right. She’s so not alright that this beat crescendos with her purposefully setting the house on fire and as you try to control the main character to save everyone, I began to wonder if that would even be possible. The main character wakes up on the side of a bus after an accident with the family that just died crouched around him - all with different names - and it becomes clear nothing is as it seems.

Yes, that's the 'You Guys Are Getting Paid?' meme kid

Dec 26, 2025 / 5:41 pm

We pushed through the game all the way to the end yesterday and came out the other side a little wiser, more scared and super confused. The story is weird! It has a Final Destination meets Groundhogs Day set during The Scarlet Letter thing going on that I like. Buffalo likes a time loop story, that’s for sure. Later on through the game we realized that the first ending we got was the bad ending. Not the worst ending, because that involves some … light suicide, I guess is the best way to put it, but it was the one where we saved no one and got carted off the to the sanatorium in the back of a police cruiser. We have a specific way to get through one of these for the first time. The first play through is done blind; no looking up anything before hand, avoid all spoilers, complete media blackout. We want to make our decisions in the moment because we feel they were right. I’ll give an example. As you come to take control of the character Taylor, she and her professor John are standing over the injured Andrew and John barks some kind of order at Taylor, which I found rude. When the dialogue options came up I dove right into the venomous attacks on John because he was acting like a shit head and I did not appreciate that! Snap judgement! You can imagine that these first runs don’t go great, in fact we don’t ever get the good ending the first time.

A big complaint I had with this game is the way the Quick Time Events work. There are three distinct flavors of QTEs; the “hit this button when prompted” event, the ever-popular “press a button in time with the heartbeats” and finally “move the cursor until it lights up and press a button” to shoot or hit or throw. I think I’ve talked about this before but I like QTEs in games when they are used well and if Supermassive Games didn’t use them well I don’t think we’d have gone back so many times. This game is frustrating, though because when the heartbeat prompt comes on it just shows the button press alone “first” so if you’re quick you’ll hit that button first and fail immediately. Boo! Then the aiming mechanic is super frustrating because after the tutorial we couldn’t remember the button to press so we failed like 3 of these. Eventually we looked it up (ZR) and managed to get through the rest of them. These failures led to the death of 3 of our party members, Tanya, Daniel and Angela, in that order. By the time we got to the final set piece - which, in this game the set pieces are all almost just bombed out dilapidated colonial houses or the pathways that lead between those structures, sometimes the house is a factory or a bar or (most interestingly) a witch trial historical museum, it does start to feel a bit formulaic but by then you’re probably done anyway - back to that final set piece, this is where we lost our last party member and got carted away.

There is something going on in this game (in fact it’s in every Supermassive game so far) that I don’t really understand - you find little secret pictures or tarot cards or (in Little Hope) post cards and they will show you a premonition, something that could possibly come to pass. These are pre-defined and will show you something that happens somewhere in the storyline on some trajectory of events. I have never really figured out what to do with that information but occasionally when one of those events happens we point at the TV and say “oh hey that was that post card from that one time.” I’m either missing the point of these or there really isn’t much more to them. Sometimes they show you things that you’ve never seen exposing the fact that there is MORE to the game than you have had a chance to see, which is incentive to replay, I guess.

Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve finished the game twice we’re ready to call it, done. Earlier when I mentioned how we like to play these I walked us through the first time. After that all bets are off. Catrena has a memory like a steel trap but specifically for decisions we’ve made in past run throughs of adventure games. She’ll remember that we told Daniel to act aggressive and yell to “pull him up” 14 hours earlier. We rely on our memory, we’ll look things up, we’ll watch videos if necessary, and also retry specific chapters if things don’t go our way. Generally we do this because we aren’t trying to play these games 3, 4 or 5 times… there comes a terminal limit for me, with almost any game, the most time I’m willing to spend with it and with Supermassive games it seems to be 2 full play throughs. After that, we’re ready for something else! Little Hope doesn’t let you skip cutscenes which helps in causing playing fatigue.

After some trial and error trying to keep Daniel from dying (that was all my bad) we managed to get through the game for the second time, and kept everyone alive. The story is pretty good, though it ends up being an allegory for trauma just like seemingly everything these days (which is either an indictment about the way we treat mental health in this country or because everyone’s being lazy… or both), but also crossed with a pretty fun supernatural witch trial that spans multi-generations. The characters are all generally likable which can be the crucial element to a game like this - if I don’t like them or respect them or at least find them entertaining, I don’t want to keep them alive! In the end, we’re both happy we chose to play this, though it didn’t really add to the Christmas spirit of things outside of being “a scary ghost story” but there were much worse ghost stories to be had! Oh and a quick aside, we played this on Switch 2, but it was a Switch 1 port, which is why all the screenshots look like this. It took us a a minute to get used to the graphics, which were not great, but it ran well and never crashed. Score!

After we wrapped up the last run we looked up what the best, good and bad endings were. This left us with more questions because as entertaining as the story was, there were some serious plot points that seemingly were left by the wayside. For instance at one point the little girl is shown standing with a demon, which we had assumed was the influence of the reverend from the 1600s, but that never came to pass with no explanation. Was the reverend doing something nefarious with the little girl, is that why he guided her to make the accusations? Was she just an evil brat? There were plenty of questions that we had and apparently, replaying the game more wouldn’t have answered them. Still an enjoyable way to spend a few pajama days. If you long for an adventure game that will give you a fright and get that heart rate going you could do worse than with Little Hope.

bleets | December 23, 2025

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:35:12 -0800

I just started playing Chibi-Robo! on the Switch 2 and as I’m putting together the game page entry I had a thought.. to crop or not to crop? The game is 4:3 and the way the Switch emulators work, they put these unchangeable, hideous borders around the games. And I think that I want to crop them out, but that seems like it could be a lot of work. It also isn’t an accurate representation of what I’m playing? Which makes me want to leave them. HMMMMMMM.

games | Chibi Robo

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:26:48 -0800

When it was announced that Nintendo was finally dusting off the old purple console and bringing Gamecube games to the Switch Online Service, there were a handful of games that I was hoping to see ported over and Chibi-Robo! is one of them. It’s been on my list of games that I had wanted to explore for years but never got around to. So today, with an impending rain storm on the horizon, as well as the imminent arrival of some Christmas time off, I’ve decided to give it a real shake!

Stolen from Moby Games

My first impressions are this game is pretty weird! Way weirder than I would have expected, to be honest. The game opens on a small family that are celebrating the birthday of a young girl who refuses to remove her frog-hood-costume-thing while her parents squabble about everything including money.

The broke dad decides its time to deploy what I can only imagine is the world’s most expensive toy, the Chibi Robo. From there you begin your tiny, housekeeping platforming adventure and honestly, it’s amazing. The hook of the game is to be helpful! You want to get trash thrown away and stains cleaned up. There are lots of odd things happening including a love-lorned dog toy and a hypermasculine Kamen Ryder replica.

This game reminds me of other “on the floor” games of the era, and I wonder how intentional that is. It’s impossible to not want to compare it to Katamari Damacy, Pikmin or even Mr. Mosquito, but from what I’ve seen so far they are all very different but carry some similarities. I’ve played through the first few days and have uncovered a lot of funny little things including a side-scrolling section that is inside the kitchen sink’s drain! This is where I died (for the first time) and it caused me to put it down for the night. I’m excited to continue on and see what other kind of quirks are in store for me.

Dec 27, 2025 / 10:13 am

The last time I played Chibi-Robo I infiltrated an all-egg army called the Free Rangers, I met a water swilling pirate, some kind of weird duck based fortune teller (or possibly a sheister, the verdict is still out) and met a fat, lazy bird who won’t get out of the way. Because of all these interactions, I’ve concluded that Chibi-Robo! is a game influenced by Twin Peaks and learned the most important lesson from the success of that show; fiction is best when it’s full of cool, weird little guys! All we want to do is hang out with weird little guys that are being true and authentic to themselves and not weird guys for the sake of being weird. Lynch understood this, Kojima basically made a career out of this and I’m wondering who over there on the Chibi-Robo dev team had that same gift. Was it Miyamoto? Or possibly Kensuke Tanabe, who also had worked on Link’s Awakening which famously cites Twin Peaks as a major inspiration.

This game is super weird! And I love it, so far. The platforming challenges are very good, and the level design is amazing. There are lots of little secrets on display, very much the same way you’d be walking around the overworld in Link to the Past and see a heart container on a cliff that you were hours away from being able to grab. The progression is made through “Happy Points” and these are unlocking battery upgrades - the batteries let you explore for longer without needing to find the nearest outlet and plug yourself in. The plugging in mechanic is one of the most charming aspects of the game because with all the futuristic tech on display, the fact that this little 10cm tall robot has autonomy and can damn near store whatever objects infinitely inside of him, he still has to drag around his little power chord and plug it into the wall to charge.

I think I’m about half-way through, maybe a little more or less, I’m almost able to get up to the second floor of the house, my way being blocked by the lack of a ladder to get me there. I’ve built the first moveable ladder, possibly the clunkiest mechanic in the entire game. These machine ladders are styled like Chibi Robo (I’ll talk more about the iconography on display later) and you can push them around wherever you would like to reach NEW heights. Then you plug your little cord into one of the four sides to deploy a ladder that erects itself into the sky at a lumbering pace. Pushing these around is clunky (I often end up picking up my cord instead of grabbing onto the machine) it’s slow to move the ladder up, even slower to make it come back down, but it’s very charming in its approach. They said “how could we over-engineer the idea of a ladder” like it was some kind of shitty desing challenge and by god they nailed it so much that I actually kind of love it. Using the ladder also consumes your own power so it plays right into the health and time structure of the game. It’s incredible.

One last thing of note - my god if the Giga-Robo plotline didn’t turn out to inspire at the very least the Forest King storyline from NieR: Automata than i don’t know NieR from Adam (or Eve).

Jan 15, 2026 / 8:53 pm

I haven’t been keeping up with writing about Chibi-Robo but my god have I continued to chip away at it. It’s such a great fucking game it breaks my heart I hadn’t played it sooner. In the game you play as this tiny little robot that is gifted to the the daughter of a young family but in reality Chibi Robo is essentially the new house butler. You have lots of little tasks that you can do (or choose not to do), stories to uncover, secrets to find, things to collect - you need to be a real self starter to get the most out of this game. Imagine it like you have a work-from-home job with no real schedule and what your actual job description is keeps evolving because you find more people at your place of work that need help - this is the Chibi Robo experience.

So far I’ve grown flowers for a mummy, completed the training of a hard-boiled egg drill sargent, dug up a pirate ship from the back yard, reunited two dried out frogs and cleaned up a hell of a lot of crayon, dirt, grime, snot and funky sweat. There are so many small stories at play here it’s actually pretty difficult to keep track of them all. The big one seems to be the Free Rangers, a group of eggs that are sworn enemies of the dog, Tao. One of their soldiers was taken by the dog and I’ve recovered their dog tags, invigorating everyone to keep their training up… that is until a large group of soldiers went AWOL and defected to other areas of the house.

Four of them are now sailing aboard the Pirate’s ship, as I’ve spent some time just today running around recruiting them to be a scallywag. In exchange for hooking them up with personnel, I’ve been granted three treasure maps which I’m not exactly sure what to do with.

I really enjoy the day/night cycle of this game, it helps keep your tasks organized and doesn’t keeps it all from being too overwhelming. Somethings are available at night, people change positions, locales become more or less accessible, and it gives you an edge of time management that you need to be aware of outside of how much battery you have. Currently my day is set at 15 minutes but if you want to move the cycle along you can grab a 5/10 minute timer from the shop and shorten your time.

I remember when I said I thought I was half-way through many many days ago, turns out that was very much a lie and now I have no idea how far along I am. The next time I go back, my main priority is going to be exploring the mom’s room fully. I keep finding new ways to climb and explore in there and I know there are a bunch of nooks and crannies in there I haven’t even set foot on. I did, however, watch a performance of the funkiest flower you’ve ever met and danced with a geriatric dinosaur. Oh one thing I was thinking about, this T-Rex acts old, basically calls up whippersnappers and I think the commentary there is “building blocks are old toys, lego’s are the old way to play”. It’s charming and cute!

Jan 17, 2026 / 3:05 pm

Today I did another rain dance with the frogs, dug a dog bone out of the soft ground, reunited a deadbeat flower with his illegitimate children and had tea with Mom. I figured something out, about this game - it’s as must of a Lucas Arts adventure game as anything else and by looking at it through that lens I’ve been enjoying it even more.

There will be times where I’m essentially stuck - not being able to move the story along because I’m not exactly sure what the next beat is. The only difference is in this game you have to do some upgrades and when you are really stuck, there are things to occupy your time, like finding all the Chibi-Doors. This the most platformer thing about the game, there are tons of weird, blinking doors that transport you into some sort of inverted, Chibi Robo hellscape dimension, and they range from easy-to-find to downright invisible and need to be sussed out based on environmental clues. So as I’m running around the house trying to figure out who needs a dog bone or where to get a super nutritious vegetable, I’m able to turn my attention and alleviate my story stagnation fatigue by essentially participating in a collect-a-thon. It’s a pretty brilliant little game-play loop, not that I’m one to get bogged down by that kind of thing.

Jan 21, 2026 / 8:06 pm

After a few days of not knowing where to go I finally hit upon a vein of untapped progress. The mom has been locking herself in her room at night and the first time I went in during the day the camera did that classic “zoom in on the important thing” which i promptly ignored. Turns out if you go up there during the day you can flip a switch and open the “peephole” of her door and then cruise in during the evening to get a little one-on-one time with mom.

This game rules if only because she calls us Cheebo, a made-up name we've been using for our cat Charlie for like 5 years.

I know she’s depressed, I know her relationship is on the rocks, I understand that she lives in a house full of insane people… but it’s even worse than I thought. Sneaking in, we caught her pawing at a pile of bills, and she is sure there are receipts missing. Chibi Robo decides to be a narc and heads into the living room and digs an unknown receipt out of the couch cushions - this is a receipt for another Drake Redcrest figurine and my god she loses it. She literally calls out her husband, daughter and dog for being nuts, then screams to the heavens that she demands a divorce! I think the funniest part of all this is we received happiness points for it lol.

After this the dad has moved! He’s no longer a lump on the couch. During the day he’s outside watering the lawn and at night he’s wrapped up in a sleeping bag, snoozing outside of the mom’s bedroom. This was the thing that I’ve been missing to move the story along. Next time I go in I’m hoping I’ll start to mop up some stickers and push the narative along even further. I did unlock the last piece of equipment - Chibi Radar! Which also led me to a confrontation with Mr. Prongs. This was frustrating because I whacked the ground with my shovel and he popped out of the ground, but the camera angle completely obscured whomever Mr. Prongs is.

That’s a wrap on Chibi-Robo! I’ve worked my way through the progression of bizarre puzzles, family drama, alien encounters, death & resurrections. It’s a weird game, much weirder than you’d imagine just from the box.

It presents itself as a platformer, but often finds itself moving in and out of genres like adventure and action. It asks you to connect the dots between the wants and needs of the characters and random household detritus. While playing I couldn’t help but try to make connections of how this game came to be. The obvious influence would have to be Toy Story - while no one is looking, toys spring to life. In the game it’s explained that in the past Giga-Robo actually made a wish with the Aliens to give the toys souls, much deeper than Toy Story ever goes. But obviously the connection is there, right down to character similarities (dinosaurs and aliens and space men).

I also couldn’t help but feel as though American cartoons, specifically Tom & Jerry, were influential. While it never turns into a game of Cat & Mouse, there is a sound attached to everything Chibi-Robo does. Imagine how when Jerry decides to sneak around Tom and there is a twinkling with each tap of his tippy-toes. Every time Cheebo grabs the ladder, walks across the countertop, takes a hop, picks something up, puts something down, each and every action has an associated clink, clack, tink, pat or twinkle. It’s very charming and cute and adds a sense of whimsy to the game.

Speaking of music- this soundtrack is so fucking good. Similarly, I was also making comparisons to the soundtrack, but this time in regards to things that may or not have been influential or even aware of one another. There is a theme in the game, the evening cycle theme - Night Play that sounds like it came off an album by The Sea & Cake. There is also a movie soundtrack that I cannot put my finger on, but it reminds me of Graceland by Paul Simon.

Final Thoughts

I ended the game by collecting all of the stickers - these are awarded by exhausting specific tasks or seeing a character’s story through to the end. I think this would be considered a 100% completion, something I don’t often do, but I wanted to make sure to see all the stories and hear all the dialogue and try all the things. I’m happy I did, because I love the humanity at display amidst all these very not human things. For a game about a tiny robot, there is a huge amount of human heart to experience here.

bleets | December 04, 2025

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:13:15 -0800

I’m just now realizing that I’m woefully behind on posting photos to the gallery section. I’ve got stuff developed going back to this time last year, including photos we took in mexico when we got engaged (we’re married now lol).

Also while looking through my analog galleries I’m realizing that I need to start keeping track of which film stock I’m shooting on. If I had kept better notes on what I’m shooting I would be able to dump this to exif data, but since I’m not I’ll need to go to the binders and take out the negatives, go right to the source.

bleets | December 01, 2025

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:02:19 -0800

When looking for interesting non-fiction books to read in an effort to improve my own journaling, I was excited to find Communion, a UFO book. It’s a combination of the author’s first hand events and transcriptions of hypnotherapy sessions, hoping to unearth more memories of those same events. It’s all over the place and unfortunately the described events aren’t actually that interesting. What is interesting to me is an established sci-fi and horror author (The Day After Tomorrow, The Wolfen) decided to risk his reputation and career to write this book, presenting his anal probing by alien lifeforms as fact! If this was Joe Nobody I could assume it was a ghost writer, but this guy is on the scene in NY in the 1980s! He’s known! He’s established! and he’s telling everyone some old lady alien jerked him off in front of dozens of little goblin janitors while they gently probed his anus. It’s kind of impressive! Beyond this, the meat of the book boils down to describing a lot of unexplained lights and shadows that move in and out of the confines of our reality. With the way the author talks about events as facts, they don’t really ask a lot of questions about why any of this happening. At one point I felt this was just an allegory for his marital problems and an excuse to get him and his wife into therapy.

As the book wraps up, he begins to try to link meaning of all of this to superstitions and ideologies of every religion to have ever been documented. But these connections are so quick and rapid fire that it feels more like a stream of consciousness. I’m mostly disappointed this did not turn out to be a thing that makes me feel magic of the world, once more. As we grow older we begin to lose our enchantment for the unexplained, well I did anyway. I KNOW magic isn’t real, I KNOW the odds of foreign life finding this planet are so infinitesimally small that it will not happen before the sun gives up and dies. But I still hope that I’ll see a ghost out of the corner of my eye, I hope that I will witness a miracle and I hoped that this book would make the hairs stand up on the back of neck while showing me that something bigger than ourselves exists.

bleets | November 24, 2025

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:52:20 -0800

Another day in 2025, another 35mm film camera has been released. Today we’re talking about the Kodak Snapic A1! It sports a 3-element 25mm glass lens, 1/100s fixed shutter speed, f9.5 aperture, multiple exposures and a built in flash. Interestingly, what separates this from the other recent Kodak cameras, is the auto-advance and powered rewind. At 99$ I think there’s a lot to like about this camera. If it was more than that I think I would find it lacking but for cool hundo it seems like an okay deal. I still think I would rather put the money into the MC-A but also, I would be less worried about this getting knocked around. The fixed aperture and shutter speed is a weird choice - I’m sure it had a lot to do with production costs - it seems pretty limiting. I’m very glad they didn’t slap a terrible LED flash on this thing; they knew they needed the exposure because once the sun starts setting you’ll have to use the flash. And that could be great! I like flash-on-camera style portraiture and think this could work well for some fun bar-shots and nightime portraits. I’ll wait to see more hands-on reviews and impressions but look - any new film cameras coming out in 2025 is a good thing. If this keeps up it’s a sign that the ecosystem is sustaining itself. Film photography cannot exist in a vacuum, you need a lot of resources to keep the hobby alive and if companies are pouring R&D money into, that means it’s got enough juice to keep going. And that’s a good sign to me.

blog | Dreaming of Polaroid Hacks & Mods

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:53:25 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about the cameras in my collection that I’m not using - and can’t really use, for that matter. A lot of this is my polaroid collection. My main draw to instant photography was always packfilm. The cameras were cool, the process was really interesting and the results were always amazing. There was a time when I would find a polaroid packfilm camera at any thrift shop I went too, and eventually I picked up a 600SE off of craigslist for pretty cheap. But then fujifilm killed off the film. I have some packfilm left but I’m sure its probably dried up by now. Even if it weren’t, it would be basically the last of an era and once THAT was gone it was gone, gone. And while packfilm will almost definitely never come back, at least not in the way that we had once had access, the cameras could have a second life, or at least should.

So here is a collection of 3D printed cameras, adapters, and odds & ends that could make that a reality, just some things I’ve seen across the internet all collected in one place. I don’t have a 3D printer anymore but seeing all of this really puts that back on the top of my “must buy” list.

Polaroid Spectra itype and 600 film pack adapter

There are a few of these polaroid spectra film adapters floating around out there and I'd like to investigate them. I LOVE the spectra cameras I have. Originally I was loading them with this weird GRID film and shooting them like crazy but that's all dried up by now. Being able to use iType film in them is intriguing.

Polaroid Spectra itype and 600 film pack adapter

Another of the Spectra iType battery packs and converters

SPRKPLG - Make Memories & Art

Okay this persons website is both equal parts irritating and inspiring. On the one hand, they are making all these cool 3D printed cameras. On the other hand, they are relying on patreon and drops for distribution and there store is completely cleaned out. Makes me want to investigate their camera that takes 600SE lenses and a Lomograflok back for instax wide.

LigeroLG & GansoLG Camera Body for Lomograflok + Mamiya Press or Polaroid 600SE Lens

Here is a modification of the SPRKPLG camera. These take the lenses for the aforementioned Polaroid 600SE and basically make it into its own camera body. Pretty cool stuff.

Heres a video of SPRKPLG putting one of these together.

Lo-Fi & DIY

This guy is also making some 3D printed adapters for Polaroid cameras including a 600SE to Graflok adapter plate which would allow you to use the Lomograflok back (though it has some focusing issues).

SX-70 Revolution

I haven't kept up with the news on SX-70 folder modding. This is the group responsible for making the new circuit boards for these cameras.

RB67 Instax Back

A very much out of stock instax back that I think is mentioned in one of the posts from spaq.in.

Mamiya RB67 Instax Back

Another 'unobtainable' instax back from a HK fabricator.

FUJICA WIDE 60

When I do these link dumps, it’s generally the result of me wanting to close out 50+ browser tabs, and they don’t feel specific enough that I should be bookmarking them. So at some point in all of this I turned my attention away from medium format cameras as polaroids and started thinking about my Fujifilm GS645S Wide 60. I’m packing for our mini-honeymoon and I pulled that out of it’s case and the front lens element was all wonky. Long story short, and I’m going to do a post about this later, there are 3 screws under the center ring of the lens and two of them were sticking out of their holes (kind of like the screws in the lens of my Canon Auto Zoom 814). These are some links that I’m saving for when I have the where-with-all to take the top off and clean the rangefinder coupling arm.

Slow rangefinder on GS645S

Forum post about fixing the sluggish rangefinder

Calibration proecdure for Fuji GS645 Rangefinder

Another forum post about how to calibrate the linked rangefinder

Fuji GS645S full CLA! Rangefinder adjustment?

More forum discussing the rangefinder adjustment

Loose Notes on GS645s Repairs

This is a new site for me, there are some interesting posts aside from this one, which is about fixing parts of the Wide 60. They also make a new rangefinder window, which is interesting, and provide specs if you need to make your own.

Fuji GS645S Wide60 Shutter disassembly

More forum posts! This one about taking apart and fixing the shutter / lens assembly.

Polaroid 110a/b

Finally, while unable to sleep the other night I read an offhand comment on some reddit post about instax film that people have been adapting the Polaroid 110a-style cameras to use the lomograflok and I’m extremely interested in this. And I haven’t done too much research into this! But it’s on my radar now.

A fully reversible Polaroid Pathfinder 110a / 110b / 800 / 150 & Lomograflok conversion

One of the first search results for this modification.

games | Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:07:38 -0800

Two games in 24 hours what’s happening over here?! Perhaps I’m finally getting my groove back, or maybe it’s that I heard MONACA is doing the music for Age of Imprisonment and since Catrena & I have played the other Warriors games, we decided this rainy Friday would be the perfect day to start Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment.

I liked the last Hyrule Warriors game, and I think the first one they made, after it was done getting ported with all the DLC and everything, is maybe one of the greatest “desert island” games of all time. It has so much content crammed in and its all done through the loving hand of Zelda fans. The follow-up to that was a cool way to experience the world of Breath of the Wild, but still done with a lot of fan service in mind. That’s what I expect out of Age of Imprisonment - an expansion of the story of Zelda’s time in ancient Hyrule.

I’ve now made it through the tutorial and its a lot of what I had expected and am optimistic I’m going to enjoy this. Tomorrow Catrena and I will do a little co-op play, I’m excited to see how it performs.

Nov 15, 2025 / 11:23 am

It’s raining here in the southland and that means we get to indulge our laziness a little extra by firing up some co-op Hyrule Warriors. Getting through the tutorial we’re able to split-screen some missions and the performance has been rock solid. It also turns out that I’m the number one Mineru fan - she’s so lanky and her fighting style weird. I love summoning a giant Zonai murder car and bowling through a huge crowd of enemies, or setting up a bomb and whacking it like I’m playing stickball. She’s just a lot of fun so far.

We’ve been introduced to who we’re referring to as “Finn & Jake” - a fake Link construct who has been saddled with a little buddy, the unfortunately named Calamo. This team up is cute and I’m excited to learn more but they do feel straight out of Adventure Time.

Oh hey speaking of characters, what the fuck is this thing?

Lady in Waiting? What's she waiting for?

Nov 17, 2025 / 8:21 pm

We’ve been co-oping this now for about 4 days and it’s very good. I have some complaints which I’ll get into but first I want to talk about the things that I’m enjoying. The story it’s laying out, “Zelda in Ancient Hyrule” is great. When they planted the seeds for this in Tears of the Kingdom they left a lot to be filled in later, they clearly knew they were going to put this into production and the story lends itself to be more cannon than the alternate timeline, cute baby guardian robot, multi-verse thing that was happening in Age of Calamity. We have some new characters that are good, including the unfortunately named “Calamo”, and the newly dubbed Knight Construct.

I don’t want to go too deep into the upgrade process because, to me, it feels fairly inconsequential. As you collect material and unlock new areas on the map icons will pop up allowing you to spend resources to gain a new skill or combo for specific characters. This ends up just being a chore to dance around the map in between battles clicking the A button a bunch until no more icons are lit up. The weapons upgrades, I’m going to be honest, I haven’t really spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. You get materials and you spend them 5-at-a-time to level up weapons. So I’ve just been doing that as quickly as possible to keep everyone mostly up-to-snuff.

My biggest complaint so far has been the battles! They are quick, short and feel very much the same. In older games you’d have a big map and lots of outposts and generals that were in trouble and areas that were threatened to fall and you do get that sometimes, mostly with the bigger story battles - though they’ve rarely felt frantic and urgent - the in-between missions that unlock new parts of the land have largely been ‘capture 2 areas, beat 1 big guy.’ Just a couple of minutes! I’m hoping as we open up more of the world the content will get meatier. I liked the sprawling battles of the past games and hope those make a return.

Oh my god why am I talking about any of this when we could be talking about the best kept secret in all of gaming. This game basically has secret Star Fox baked into it. Because the Knight Construct can turn into whatever the plot may require, he’s a perfect candidate to soar through the sky islands while Calamo blasts acorns at keese or aerocudos or gleeoks. I love these levels and hope they expand on what we’ve seen in later games.

Nov 24, 2025 / 7:57 pm

We’re still playing a bit of Hyrule Warriors everyday! I’ll be honest, it’s honestly pretty samey-samey. The only saving grace is that every once in a while some random character they made up just for this game will join your roster. And sometimes, those characters are Ronza…

This meme will cross-over with like 4 people

And sometimes those characters are fat little gourmands that kick ass…

Bratton would live down by the quarry.

It’s fun! But there isn’t a lot of challenge for multiplayer on normal so we’ve finally pumped it up to “hard”. The jump wasn’t too bad, we had to get used to sharing our 4 total heals but after a battle or two we were back. I’m still lamenting the lack of real challenges and longer levels in between the story missions but it hasn’t been that big of a speedbump.

Dec 2, 2025 / 3:47 pm

After a mini-honeymoon and a couple of days of “vacation from our vacation” we dipped our toes back into HW. We continued our press through the small story missions and then after a few of those we again did a big story, and then the map filled up with chores to click and we clicked those and then we did a few small missions and then a big story mission and then the map filled up with chores …

Dec 22, 2025 / 7:33 am

We have finished Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment! At least we’ve finished all the missions leading up to the final story mission. It actually became quite surprising to not see any smaller, orange missions flashing, luring us in to a 3 to 5 minute long scuffle. The disparity between missions sizes in this game is large; the story missions will be multi part missions with a dozen of allies on the map, spanning across all three areas (sky, surface & depths) serving you cut scenes and character changes and just when you think its over it’s starting back up! They are exciting and cinematic, and the stakes feel real and high. But then you do a side mission and it becomes this 3-5 minute long formulaic romp through Hyrule where you clear out two encampments, then a big guy appears, which you finish off, then another big guy appears and you are done. By the end of this game we were using our weakest characters because we wanted to ramp up the challenge a little bit without going into ultra-hard territory. Stages that would suggest level 55+ we were doing with sub-40 guys. Our hypothesis, which would be easy to test to a conclusion if I was not already eying my backlog like a Tex Avery wolf eyes a curvy human woman, is that because we are playing this cooperatively, the game is not rebalanced. Even on hard we’re playing on easy mode.

The story is good and just engaging enough. Considering the length of time this game took us to complete (just over a month of on-again off-again) it was impactful enough to keep us from forgetting the big story beats, but not so important that it ever felt confusing or foreign when we didn’t remember something. But the story isn’t the reason you play these games, you play them because you get to air juggle 100 bokoblins in the air while they all scream bloody murder. You play them because you can be Mineru, sister of the ancient king of Hyrule, who spawns zonai constructs ad infinitum and drops giant spiked bombs on bad guys while serving cunt. You play this because you want to run around in a Zelda game playing as a rito or a goron or a sad fish girl and make Ganon’s minions pay for their crimes. And it works, it’s satisfying and runs incredibly surprisingly well. This game only ever stumbles when we’re in co-op, in the same area, fighting separate giant bosses (like a hinox or a big boss bokoblin) and the two of us would use a sync strike with nearby companions. This scenario would drag the framerate down, but nowhere near to what you’d expect from a warriors game.

Now that its over, we’re talking about what else we can have in the background waiting for us. What other coop games have a pick-up-and-play style that doesn’t require a lot of investment for maximum reward. God the financials of Hyrule Warriors really are in the players favor. Its a 60$ game, there is about 40 hours or more of base content, way more if you get into all the incredibly specific tasks they ask of you; things like “reflect 5 enemie attacks while in flight mode as Mineru” or “Use 2 lightning attacks near a body of water as Raphica.” These are almost like achievement level asks but they unlock rare material used in upgrading your characters and gaining favor of the regions on the map. They’ve also just dropped a big content update which added in more to do. Most of this update is not for me. It’s new weapons and unique skills, and what I want is more battles, big ones, with lots of requirements for completion. I want to have to repel enemies from encampments and escort people across the maps and unlock pathways and have a timer counting down - big bold missions that seem insurmountable that require me to switch characters to quickly move around the map because this general is in trouble and we can’t lose them. This is what’s missing from Age of Imprisonment, a challenge beyond the enemies who are just damage sponges. Much of the Zonai tools you can deploy help mitigate the armor barriers anyway! You can pull out a flamethrower, drop it on the ground and most enemies are pretty unhappy about that! It turns out being set on fire is also a source of displeasure in this world. So go ahead and just burn them to the ground! And when two people are doing it hoo boy watch out. It kind of becomes a hack or feels like a cheat that you can just set down these flame throwers without spending considerable battery and it immobilizes even the more powerful Lynels.

There were some boss fights that were tense and fun. The evil version of the mysterious construct was actually quite difficult, though we thought we would need to restart this but we squeeked through without failing. One interesting thing that both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild could have learned from was the way they handled enemy variations. They started adding onto enemies elements or gloom. So now you’re fighting an Ice Hinox, or a Fire Big Boss Bokoblin. They had some new attacks and it kept things feeling fresh. They didn’t get fun with it, though, and like throw a battlefield just full of octoroks or swarms of fire keese or give you the mission to kill 100 peblit in 5 minutes. These would have made the interstitial missions more interesting and memorable.

Final Thoughts

In the gauntlet of big, coop action games, with special focus on characters you know and love, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment sits towards the head of the table, but it is no King or Queen. It offers great big set pieces full of baddies, an impressive and weird lineup of characters spanning races and robots and controls that are easy enough that they fade into the background, becoming second nature. It’s overworld map based level navigation left something on the table that could have been more refined, having to click around at a dozen flashing icons on a map to unlock a new skill can be a bit tedious, kind of like collecting your gems or giblets or whatever-the-fuck from a mobile game. While it was flush with characters, it felt lacking in battle diversity, though maybe they used up all those resources building out an impressive but underutilized rail shooter. Have we talked about this yet? There is a hidden Star Fox game sitting square inside of your damned Hyrule Warriors. Hold on, I’ve got to make a meme.

stupid lol

This on-rails shooter is actually very fun. You are flying through the air like the owls of legend in a fixed path, attacking using a variety of Zonai equipment. You are also unlocking more batteries which let your equipment last longer and picking up upgrades. It doesn’t get too deep but what is there is very fun. The other thing it has going on is lots of SCALE CHANGES! Just like NieR and NieR: Automata (and I’m sure lots of old arcade games I’ve never heard of which influenced the likes of Yoko Taro, Hideki Kamiya, etc) your perspective of the ship and the scale of the map goes through changes. At one point it becomes just this intense top-down bullet hell game and it absolutely ruled. Maybe this is the best use of an on-rails aerial assault game, smack dab in the middle of a hack-and-slash, not relying too much to evolve that gameplay, but give you just enough at face value to remind you that shmups are cool as hell. And so is Hyrule Warriors.

games | Dispatch

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:19:25 -0800

Wow what a break from any kind of games that was! But there could really be no better reason, Catrena and I got married! I’m not going to get too deep into now but planning a wedding really took a lot of my time, focus and creative energy! So much so that I neglected my website. But a good website isn’t something that has any feelings or knows when its being used too much or too little. It should stand like a lighthouse; looking stoic when dormant and lighting up to guide the way when needed.

And now that we’re post wedding, recovering from what I can only describe as the greatest weekend of all time, I decided to bust out the Steamdeck and give Catrena and I a little R&R with a brand new adventure game from the team that made The Wolf Among Us, now under the the moniker AdHoc Studio; Dispatch.

This kind of “choose your own adventure” game is one of our favorites to play together. We’ve played through some Dark Picture Anthology games (I guess not since I’ve launched this website), we’ve also played through Until Dawn and the Quarry and have a great time doing it. Dispatch won’t have the same scares as those, but from my experience with the Wolf Among Us, it’ll give us that good narrative.

I am writing this post credits on the final chapter. We’ve put a late night and early morning into finishing and it was well worth it! The first thing I noticed is the writing is excellent. It has a lot of heart and while there a fair number of tropes at play, it still felt a fresh perspective. The story is another behind-the-cape super hero epic that shows you the inner workings and relationships of your everyday superhero. The writing is good - it’s crass and potty-mouthed for sure, but it also builds some good characters and relationships. I particularly like Chase - voiced by Jeffrey Wright - the now-aged, super fast Star Blazer that did not realize he was advancing his aging while moving at the speed of light. He does fall into some stereotypes but his performance and story are pretty great.

fart barf lol

There are other great performances here as well, which is why the lows in acting feel very low. It felt as though they used the idea of internet personalities as a form of viral marketing and while this is obviously preferable to using AI, when journalists and streamers without VA chops are acting next to the creme-de-la-creme of voice acting (Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Travis Willingham) and Hollywood stars (Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright), the disparity was apparent. And not just in the way they acted, but also in possibly how it was recorded. The voice acting for Malevola felt like it was recorded in an Applebees - I found her extremely hard to understand and it wasn’t until well into the story did I even know they were foreign (Australia, I believe). But then at the same time Jacksepticeye did EXCELLENT as Punch-Up man, but perhaps they were not necessarily acting and were actually used to punching a bunch of dicks in bar fights.

The Game

On to the meat of why we’re here- the game itself. Outside of the dialogue choices there are quicktime events that feel completely inconsequential. So much so they give you the option of shutting them off completely. Me being a freak for cool QTEs kept them on but the next play through I’ll shut em off because they don’t really feel like they contribute anything to the story. I will need to check to see if there are any achievements linked to them but they feel kind of secondary - just around to make it feel more like a game.

Outside of dialogue, beyond quicktime events, nestled in between fight scenes, romances and tecno-jargin lives the part of this game that is going to keep me coming back for more… it’s The Dispatch of it all. As if AdHoc pilfered a new minigame from a Yakuza series, the team management mode of sending out super heroes on calls to help out subscribing citizens is an absolute joy to play.

The Dispatch

Here’s the breakdown. You have a roster of superheroes - who is on that roster depends on the choices you make - these heroes (and yes I know they aren’t heroes, they are villains that you are trying to rehabilitate but for the sake of discussion) each have special abilities and a 5-point graph of skills. You can pump these skills up with points earned by leveling. There is a big map of Torrance, CA where various events will pop-up; a problem will be described and a client will be issued. You need to decipher the highlighted key words that correlate to the various skills (intelligence, charisma, strength, speed and defense/vigor). Choose the right combo of heroes to tackle the specific problems. Each task takes a set amount of time, there is travel time and from the task as well as cooldowns for the specific heroes that have been sent out - each hero will have a specific rest period. It’s a brilliant time management game that lets you tune your heroes how you see fit while also occasionally mixing up the formula. Some characters will have abilities that let you add heroes to tasks, mental health plays a factor as does the morale of your team and whom they work well with. It’s literally the best Yakuza minigame ever made… okay maybe not better than Yakuza’s Cabaret Grand Prix but it’s damn close!

Another high point for me was the way the skill graph would also double as skill checks. By sending more than one hero out on a task your skill graph would combine and their skills would multiply. Depending on the task, there can be an interruption that would require additional intervention and with that… skill checks! If, say, you were trying to figure out which class to compete in a local LARP as, you could deduce that the BARD class would require high charisma… and you would be correct! Choose bard and you would have to meet or match a skill check in order to successfully complete that task. All these variations kept this minigame feel so fun and fresh that I’m upset there is not some kind of infinite mode where I can just answer tasks until I got sick of it.

Any complaints about this mini game are all leveraged towards quality of life. Occassionally it’s hard to select the correct event on the map. When there are a half dozen icons that need your attention it can be troublesome navigating through them all and it caused me to miss answering a call. Navigating through the character menu to do upgrades is clumsy. I sometimes sent heroes out on tasks without confirming all members causing me to fail due to lack of skills. But these are small things that would sometimes just add to a bit of the chaos of managing the time. And it can get chaotic!

Hack the Planet

One additional layer to this game is a new and improved hacking minigame. No longer will Pipe Dream be the gold standard for hacking mini games, Dispatch is ready to take it’s seat among games like Fallout 3 and NieR: Automata for introducing a new kind of hacking game into the mix.¹ When it’s time to hack you get transported into a top-down grid and need to navigate to various points which have you input the correct sequence of directional inputs. These input could be right there for you to follow or they could be broken up and hidden around the map. There are enemies to dodge, puzzles to solve, lots of little variations and tricks that keep this feeling fresh through to the end of the game. I enjoyed most of the hacking; there is one task that asks you to “match a frequency” and you have to find the specific spot on the map that has the same waveform and it felt like it rarely worked.

The City Where We’re From

Before starting this neither I nor Catrena knew it was set in the very real city of Los Angeles which is where we live! It was also obviously made by people who live here because there are some very fun little jokes about LA peppered in, including the very big joke of setting the Z Team’s stomping grounds in Torrance. While I wouldn’t say Dispatch is a love letter to Los Angeles, it’s certainly a clever post card saying “wish you were here.”

The Path We Chose

Yes, I love Invisigal. Yes, she’s the perfect wounded bird and her sex dream scene was a surprise that also made her more of a favorite… but we still chose the Blonde Blazer for our first time. I actually thought she was going to turn out to be evil but we stuck with her! Now that we know how that part of the story played out we’ll go back and try to keep Invisigal on the straight and narrow and see if we can get some romance happening. This is the fun of these games! When you get to the end and the characters are well written, it makes you want to go back and spend MORE time with them. And if they do their job (the developers, that is) you get to spend NEW time with them as well. I have no doubt that Dispatch will be fun to replay again. We’ll go through at least one more time and when we do I’ll update our findings.

Nov 17, 2025 / 8:18 pm

Okay I’m not sure if we are going to get back to this anytime soon so I’m calling it done for the time being. If we come back I’ll update this then! I feel bad leaving Invisigal high and dry but she’ll understand!

This could be derivative of something else out there, if it is I am not aware of it! It felt fresh enough to me to for me to give it this fanfare. ↩︎

bleets | October 22, 2025

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 07:23:37 -0700

I read this morning that Lomography has announced a new 35mm film camera that has a rather exciting feature set. It’s a small, compact, full frame camera - it feels funny to have to qualify that in 2025 but there have been like three new half-frame cameras sent to market recently, four if you include that insane fuji x-half, which yes is digital but still - zone AND auto-focus and shutter speed controls from bulb up to 1/500. There are a lot of things about this camera that I like, at least on paper; it includes some features of legendary cameras of the past like the Klasse, Contax and Mju. I am going to wait for a few un-sanctioned reviews before I get too excited, I know lomo dances around the build quality line making it a gamble whether or not their products are built to last. With something like this coming off the production line, though, I think it’ll help people find a quality feature-set on an affordable camera without resorting to extraordinary prices for what essentially amounts to a ticking time-bomb. This could replace my Olympus XA or XA-2 as my daily driver, but not unless I know it can stand up to a little bit of abuse first.

blog | Wedding RSVPs & AI

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:09:31 -0700

Wedding RSVP’s

I’m getting married, it’s something I don’t know if I’ve really talked about too much on here, mostly because I’ve tried to not get overly personal, not to say that I haven’t been emotional or talked about things that have occurred to me personally, because I have. I’m also not hiding my identity, though I’m not necessarily broadcasting that to the heavens either. In anycase, I’m getting married! Yay! It’s actually very exciting because I love my fiancée very much, she’s incredible and I’m so happy we’re doing this, I cannot imagine my life without her so why not get your best and deepest and most longest lasting relationships together in one place so you can confess and profess that love to any and all!? Well because people are the worst and they will let you know that at every turn.

I don’t have a big family and I don’t have a lot of friends. I have some friends, absolutely! But I’ve moved a few times in my life, I’ve had a few friends die (which is terrible and leaves a wound that may never heal, I do not recommend this). The pandemic also helped in pushing people all around the globe, and when you leave someone’s proximity, you lose closeness. It’s just the way it works. I’ve also made the decision to cut some friends out of my life, friends who may not have been as reciprocal in friendship as I was (this I do recommend but with a caveat; life can become incredibly lonely the more you push people away, even if they deserve it). Sometimes when talking with people I’m flabbergasted at the amount of people they talk about having in their lives. Every day “my friend this, my friend that” always a new person they’ve never talked about before! I’ve never understood this because for me to really refer to someone as a friend, it’s someone I would text and chat with and someone who would tell me if they were going through a hard time, someone I’ve been through hard times with.

Anyway it’s never fun to hear someone tell you “sorry I have not accounted for you in my life and therefore cannot attend your wedding” but, if you are me, you get to hear this a lot and in varying ways! We’ve just received the last of our RSVPs and I believe - there is no way to prove it because just by asking them if it were true they would deny it, for I would never be able to hide the disdain in my questions - I THINK the “I’m sorry I/We cannot come but …” messages were written with A.I. ARE YOU SO WHOLLY HEARTLESS THAT YOU CANNOT EVEN FEIGN INTEREST IN SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE FOR 3 MINUTES TO WRITE A MESSAGE? COULD YOU BE SO DEVOID OF A SOUL THAT YOU WOULD ASK A MACHINE TO GIVE UP WELL WISHES? DID YOU EVEN READ THIS BECAUSE YOU SOUND LIKE YOU ARE CERTIFIABLY MAD. You miserable squires for the techno aristocracy, you are standing upon the picked-clean souls of those who have sacrificed their words and tears and hearts and blood so you can pretend to be sorry about something. You have truly lost your way in life and my god I fear I would see no punishment fit to grace your sentences!

I was so mad at the last one I received I pulled out a fucking typewriter and wrote an insane note which made me look like a lunatic! But how else is one expected to combat incompetence at such a level? By regressing and using the angriest writing method known to man. I will say, I was about 50% less angry than I was when I started, the clattering of the strikers, the travel of the keys, the way you must prop yourself like a child in preparatory school awaiting the rap of a ruler on the knuckles. Not completely satiated, rage still high, I decided to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and write a blog-post - my first in a few months! So thank you, you two, you miserable fucking assholes, for it has resurrected me back from the dark age and into the only party I need, cyberbuffalo dot mother fucking party.

blog | Fixing the lens on a Canon Auto Zoom 814

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:22:32 -0700

As we’ve been making preparations for our upcoming wedding (!), we have been talking with a friend who is going to shoot some video footage for us. I pulled out my 2 super8 cameras for an inspection, cleaning and possible fixing. I have two cameras, a Minolta Autopak-8 D4 and a Canon Auto Zoom 814, both of these were purchased at flea markets and they both power on. The Minolta I’ve actually used once before, in 2017. For a trip to the Madonna Inn for Catrena’s birthday I bought some film and shot it and then we plumb forgot about it. I just had it developed last year. To my delight it was exposed well with the exception of one section - I clearly changed a setting on the camera and was not paying attention, eventually I change it back and the exposure returns to normal.

This is the unedited footage which I think turned out pretty great. I would love to have some moments from our wedding shot like this!

Canon Auto Zoom 814

The reason I didn’t use this camera from the get-go is because it had a problem with the focus ring. The zoom feature works fine, it zooms in and out fluidly and easily, but the zoom ring twists just past 10ft and stops. It should continue to twist all the way towards that infinity sign.

I’ve know about this problem for a while and haven’t ever had the gumption to take it upon myself to take apart and fix. Disassembling a lens feels like a pretty scary task! Plus I wouldn’t say that I have exactly the right tools for it. But I was feeling spicy and since I’ve had this thing for so long I wasn’t going to let it just rot away never being used, I’d rather take it to task and fail than never try and not be able to use it. So I made the decision - I’m going ot figure out what’s stopping this lens from moving. Something had to be stuck in there, maybe a piece of the aluminum housing sheared off and got lodged in the helical threads that cause the lens to spin. The first thing I did was a thorough visual inspection of the lens.

Now, I’m no expert but to me, that looks like a washer. And it doesn’t look like it should be where it is, sticking out from behind a housing into the optical path of the lens itself… yeah. Something’s going on in there. My next step was to look up any information that is going to aid me in the process of taking this thing apart and the best resource I found was this Australian website, Super8 & 16mm Cine repair. They have a lot of teardown resources for a variety of Super8 and 16mm cameras, it’s a pretty valuable resource. They didn’t have my specific camera but did it looks like canon reused this lens on a few of the canon 814 models, so I followed this teardown.

Disclaimer

I’m not an expert. I’m not even particularly skilled in taking apart cameras, though I’ve brought a few back to life in my day. If you are coming here because your Canon Auto Zoom 814 is having a focus problem, if the focus or zoom rings are stuck then heed the warning and proceed at your own risk. I have confidence in you but take it slow and learn from my mistakes!

The first struggle is making sure you have screwdrivers small enough for the flat-head screws that need to be removed. I found it easiest to clean the screws first, there was a fair amount of crud stuck in mine. I took a safety pin and hard bristled brush and carefully cleaned out the grooves, trying my best not to damage the lens housing or gouge out the screw.

They are very small and quite dirty

It took me a couple of screws before I got the feel of extraction, they are so small they don’t off the same kind of tactile feedback a larger screw would, but if you take your time you can begin to recognize when the driver is slipping, the screw is turning, etc. With those three screws of the outer housing out, I had to make a decision. Do I buy the right tool for this job or proceed with a Macguyvered fix? I don’t own a lens or watch spanner, something you generally need to remove the retaining rings from round things. On the top of the lens there is a threaded ring that has two grooves on opposite sides that let you put in a two-pointed spanner and twist. You can put a screwdriver in one slot, tap the back and try to release it that way, but you run the risk of slipping and scratching the lens, bending the housing or damaging the ring. I don’t remember where I saw this trick, but someone had suggested once that you could use a sacrificial pair of calipers set to the correct measurement.

Take your time and be gentle!

This actually worked great. I have two sets of these kind of cheap digital calipers (probably from Harbor Freight), one of them sits pretty in a case and the other - this pair - thrown with abandon into a tool box. They are good for measuring gross stuff or performing abusive tasks, such as this. And I have to say it did this quite well. I think it was helpful the ring wasn’t deformed or damaged, and it wasn’t extremely tight.

Getting that ring off allowed me to continue to work my way down the lens, removing more sets of tiny screws and eventually get to the point where 4 screws hold the front lens element housing to the rear zoom lens housing. This is where our problem lies.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

Remember! Be gentle when removing the lens elements and by god remember how they were oriented!

The Problem

Well, it turns out I was right. Well, half right - there was something stuck in the path of the zoom lens, but it wasn’t aluminum or some foreign entity, it was a screw! TWO screws, in fact. The two upper-most screws were gone!

One of them was out in the open - I removed that and the two other washers - but the problem remains. I was hoping this was as far as I’d have to go but this entire housing needed to come out. Not only does this need to get removed, I need to take it apart and in order to do that, I need to be able to unscrew it but that black tab is in the way. That black tab is also confirming the problem is within because that tab should rotate all the way from one end, to the other, but is stopping about half-way, just like before. We’re close! But that tab is also preventing us from opening it up. I’m going to attempt to bend it forward just enough so it doesn’t break - but to let it clear the housing.

Success! Now that I can unscrew this, we’re in. Deeper and deeper into this thing, much more than I had hoped we needed to go. The further in you go the further you are from the start, making getting this thing back together that much more difficult. But we persist. With that tab pulled up we can now unscrew this housing and …

There’s the culprit! Set let she was born there, my god. This thing was LODGED into the soft aluminum so much i needed a pair of tweezers to rock it out. I think from years of trying to twist this may have stripped the screws because while it screwed in, it never felt tight. I’m considering I should have left it out altogether, what if it were to dislodge itself again? Ultimately I kept it in because the lens was nice and tight, it had never felt more secure. Plus if it comes out I know how to open it up.

Putting it back

I think the hardest thing about this entire ordeal was putting it back together. I had made some registration marks on the exterior housing of the lens, but since there is nothing to justify the housings to any specified point on the interior, it all becomes relative. I should have done a better job of keeping track of how the casings came off. The lens elements were easy to track, I placed them down on a soft cloth the way they came out and marked up a post-it note next to each. The biggest mistake I made? There were two different sized tiny screws and I didn’t realize this before reassembly. Well that smaller screw fit right into the hole of the exterior housing and… got stuck. It wasn’t making contact with the threads so I couldn’t unscrew the thing - it lived there. I tried three things to get this small screw out of it’s larger hole prison - dental pick, magnets, safety pin. None of it worked except super glue.

IF THIS EVER HAPPENS TO YOU! Get yourself something smaller than the screw. I used the head of a small safety pin but I bet a sewing needle or something would work. I pushed the pin into a new tube of super glue, cleaned it off so it was just concentrated ever so slightly at the tip and stuck her in. I wish I had some kicker but time will have to do the kicking. The pin stuck! I pulled slowly and… it didn’t work. But what it did do was give the screw enough purchase into the threads for me to slowly back it out. So task failed successfully and all that!

Conclusion

She’s back together! I think correctly. I can focus this to infinity, it seems to hold its focus no matter how much I mess around with the zoom. I need to order a couple of 1.35v mercury cell replacement batteries because the meter on this camera uses separate batteries from the 4 AA batteries that power the motors. I’m going to get a few cartridges of film stock and shoot some test footage. I was thinking this morning as I was writing this about how I should test the cameras. I think I’ll save this for another post, for now, I hope that this can give someone a little courage in taking apart a camera they were just going to let sit around. Better to learn than to waste.

Additional Images

Here are some more pictures I took that didn’t fit into the post. Maybe these could provide some insight.

bleets | August 31, 2025

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 23:21:08 -0700

I’ve worked out the storage on my home network recently and I’m going to do a writeup on it in the future. The macmini that was sitting on my downstairs desk not really doing anything has become a little server. I’ve attached some USB-C drive enclosures to it and have moved everything off of my failing WD MyCloud NAS. I’ve got calibre, jellyfin and transmission setup as well as a web server. I need to build a smal quick website that will remind me of all the different places on my home network these services reside. like to access jellyfin its ip.address:8096 and I have to look it up each time.

The other thing I have been poking around at is Tailscale. I would like to have access to some of this stuff when I’m not at the house and this seems like one of the best ways to do it. Again, I’m doing a much bigger writeup on this stuff but I wanted to get something up before I forget about everything I’ve done.

games | Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter: Demo

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 20:53:12 -0700

Rappy | Jul 23, 2025 8:09 AM

how Falcom are you willing to Falcom

This question was posed to me by my friend Rappy about a Trails in the Sky restock at VGP. At this point I hadn’t ever really considered playing a trails game, I’m not generally drawn to turn based games. I politely turned my head away from the restock and went about my day. Then on the 24th of this month the remake of the first Trails game released and I swear to god everyone was talking about it.

CYBERBUFFALO | Aug 21, 2025 5:38 AM

Okay I know I said I didn’t care about it, but I keep seeing all these Falcom sickos gushing over the trails in the sky remake and like… I kind of want it now

And guess what? I freaking loved it. I don’t know ANYTHING about the series other than “FALCOM” so I’m not saying I’m turning into a Trails-head or anything, but this demo has been pretty great so far. The way they’ve translated the combat into this hybrid hack-n-slash/turn based affair works so incredibly well.

I haven’t finished the entirety of the demo yet, I’ve done the training mission in the sewer and rescued the kids from the tower. I’ve also gone through the fields and finished the first 3 officials bracer quests. I’m shocked this demo is still going, it’s quite a bit of the game. I guess that’s how they hook you in!

There are a lot of systems at play here from how you switch between the two battle modes, when to switch modes to get extra attacks, the different kind of attacks, etc. They are all explained quickly and succinctly; sometimes I find games drone on and on about things making them overly complicated and here they get straight to the point. And MY point is they are doing good things with this game. I’m looking forward to picking up the full game but I’m still going to finish off this demo first!

Sep 25, 2025 / 10:59 am

I’ve finally wrapped up the Trails demo! What a game! Sometimes I feel disqualified for talking about turn-based RPGs because I’ve played so few of them. I’ve played through a handful of hours of Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest) on NES, I got out of Midgard in FF7, Chrono Trigger on the DS and I beat it but don’t remember ANYTHING about it most recently (in the last 5 years or so) I’ve finished Octopath Traveler 1 and given up on Octopath Traveler 2. So when I play this game and see that it has a hybrid Turn-Based X Hack & Slash combat system that melds those two styles together seemlessly it feels fresh, it feels new. I feel like maybe some of the Tales games have done similar? I seem to remember Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube having some kind of hybrid battle system. Look, I get it, its not new! But it feels so well designed that it just feels fresh.

I was surprised by how long the demo was. It takes you through the entire first section of the game. You move through the brace training, graduate and start doing missions. I like the core loop of the game. Get assigned a big mission and pick up smaller fetch-quest-esque missions along the way. You can bounce around the map talking with NPCs or listening to them talk to each other. There are small stories going on in the town, NPCs feel like they are living out a full life, making changes and interacting with each other. It’s cute and subtle but really does a lot to enhance the vibes of the game.

One thing to note, the sexual tension between the “siblings” is noticeable and weird. Like I understand Joshua was taken into this family when he was tweening and considering every other woman in his life is highly sexualized, I guess it makes sense but I don’t have to like it. Or maybe I don’t have to condone it. Am I rooting for him? Sure thing, bud, have at it, I guess. But I think his dad should have tried to put a stop to it years ago or at least stop calling them siblings. If they had stuck with something more traditional like calling Joshua his ward than this wouldn’t be so fucking weird. Other than the incest stuff the story is interesting and I really do like the world.

The battle system is very cool and I like the way Orbaments work. If I play through the full game I will need to dig a little deeper into how they work. Right now I don’t fully understand how you know what spells you will get from equipping quartz in the Orbment slot, all of that feels a big vague, but the way the game was balanced I never felt like i was under leveled. I died a few times, including during the last fight, but a lot of this came down to me not properly healing.

SPEAKING OF THE FINAL BATTLE I LOVE JOSETTE. She’s great and I hope she will eventually join my team. She’s my favorite of the extended cast, which is crazy because there is also a mousy master photographer lady whom I also very much like. What I’m getting at here is the cast of characters are GREAT and this is now a Josette fan-website. www dot cyberjosette dot party. I like how they the personality of each characters is put straight into their special actions, it really lets them shine. For instance Scherazard is a sex-crazed freak and when she performs her special she talks about “whipping all the bad boys” and .. it really helps you get invested in the world.

I’m happy I played through this, I’m going to pick up the full version of the game at some point. If the last few months have taught me anything its that Falcom games tend to hit the clearance bin at some point and in the interest of saving a few bucks I’m going to wait until the physical Switch 1 version comes down in price a bit.

Final Thoughts

There is something uniquely Falcom about this series. Maybe it’s because I’ve played enough Ys that I recognize the hallmarks of the company within their second pillar, for instance it wasn’t twenty minutes before a character pulled out a Harmonica. I’m looking forward to diving into the full game and losing what I can only imagine is a hundred plus hours. But maybe I’m wrong! Maybe like Ys, Falcom keeps it high and tight, so to speak. Would obviously need to play the full thing so I won’t put the official stamp on it just yet, but if all plays out the way I’m expecting, we’re talking about a Buff Certified banger here.

games | Donkey Kong Bananza

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 20:41:51 -0700

Welcome to the SWITCH 2! After a monster run of work I finally forced myself to sit down and crack open my brand new copy of Donkey Kong Bananza. Sometimes if I go through an extended period of time without grabbing a controller I can find it hard to get back into the groove of playing anything. I need to crack the ice again and get myself back into the habit. But I’m into it now, I’ve been playing on-and-off for a few weeks and I’ve been enjoying it.

Even as I played through the first few areas I couldn’t keep myself from saying “this game is crazy”. It’s very satisfying to smash through the rocks. I think they were really smart with how they made that first area because there was TONS of rock to destroy. I spent way too long in there digging around looking for secrets buried in the rocks. When breaking through the rocks you’ll occasionally find things like gold, bananas, coins or treasure chests. It took me way to long to realize that the treasure chests were procedurally generated; in a level towards the beginning you’re able to equip some clothes that increase the appearance rate of the chests.

I’ve gotten through the opener, the tutorial level and the first 2 big open areas as well. I feel as I continue to move through this game I appreciate the level design less and less. One of the “levels” was a big huge grassy field which wasn’t super exciting to smash around through. This area also had a bunch of water that you could swim around in. Each area has multiple sub-levels to it as you go further and further in the worlds core. The level I’m at right now also has water but this time… it’s water that hurts you! Which I hate. If you dig too deep, water-that-hurts-you comes out or you fall in. and it hurts you. It puts a pretty big damper on the fun I was having in the previous areas.

This area also has spiky vines and enemies you cannot bunch. That last point is really annoying because this game teaches you one thing really early on - if there is a puzzle or a problem or some kind of situation, the solution is to punch it. Once not enough? Punch it twice! Maybe just give it one more punch and see if that does it! Need to open a door? Punch it! Unlock a lock with a key??? Punch it! Just don’t punch these enemies, oh no, that won’t do at all. Oh god this area also turns you into this awful, horrible gorilla/bird hybrid thing and it’s fucking awful.

I’ve gotten to the third area of the poison bird world - hopefully I’m almost done with it and get the hell out of here. There was a choice to go to this crappy poison forest world inhabited by terrible birds or the ice world - maybe I’ll get through this and have more fun punching ice blocks and making snowballs.

Something I have been enjoying are the challenge levels. There are gateways you can find in each area that will take you to some kind of challenge - combat, platforming or puzzles. These have been fun! A few of them have played on scale and thrown you into a 2D world, maybe my favorite thing that games do. One of them was even Donkey Kong Country themed (the challenge was called “Nostalgia Country”)! Pretty cool stuff.

Sep 25, 2025 / 9:13 pm

I’m still noodling my way through this game. I’m having some trouble with it, though. There were two levels that I found so bad that it put me off coming back for a few weeks. I talked about this in my previous post but the poison-bird-level really sucked the fun out of this game. Small islands of land, surrounded by poison water you can’t touch, infested with both enemies and vines you can’t smash. This game is about two things, smashing shit and eating bananas. When you hamstring the primary mechanic I hope you’ve got some b & c mechanics to back it up and I don’t think it does. I keep earning these Elder Powers and they don’t exactly feel distinct enough to require an entire transformation. The gorilla is strong, the zebra (lol) is fast and light(?) and the ostrich (horrible, it’s so bad) can fly. That last one I understand, okay, sure you need to transform into this ungodly monster to allow you to glide through the air (terrible, btw).

My enjoyment of the game increased dramatically once I got past these two levels and went back to the earlier spaces and collected some random bananas (this was part of a plot point which makes me think they knew). I wish that there was more permanent transformations that permanently corrected the ills of the lands. Like I got rid of the poison spewing plants in the awful poison bird world yet water that kills you persists. With so much emphasis on persistant change, this blindsided me.

The best thing that’s happened in a while is the existence of the Resort Layer and it’s goo that makes you fly. This world has excellent design! And it’s colors don’t feel like a bad psychotic breakdown. It’s pretty and calm and relaxing and has excellent platforming and puzzle solving and oh it’s done? Oh okay nevermind. The smallest area from the beginning and now I’m in some kind of terrible storm world inhabited by those same crystal men and giant nerdy elephants. This area also introduces a new kind of lava? One that looks just like the gold that you smash through every 4 seconds, but you can’t touch this because it kills you. This area at least has had some good puzzles and platforming but now I can turn into an elephant that sucks up stuff in its path with one button and then spits that stuff out with the same button but only half the time. So I’m taking a break. The shake-up the formula that comes during each major area feels like a speedbump in a familiar neighborhood rather than an exciting new turn. I’ll keep going and I will finish this by the end of the year, but for now I’m going to take my time so I don’t full sour on it.

Nov 17, 2025 / 7:54 pm

Can you believe it? I’m STILL playing this game. I had completely forgotten about it when I went to put the new Hyrule Warriors into the Switch 2. The other morning I had some time before Catrena came home and I WANT to finish the game so I’ve been jumping in here or there.

And my god this game will never end. At some point Catrena came into the living room and asked me what was going on so I filled her in:

“Well the father teleporting eel got mad after I beat up the big monkey guy so it ate Pauline and I and when I woke up we were in jail.”

That level was actually fun. There was a new mechanic introduced where you hit a harp and it would switch one material (rubber) for another (gold). But the puzzles designed around this feel like they were “smash it” problems that just added this little layer in front of it, they didn’t feel necessary. That isn’t to say that any of this is necessary, but the mechanic felt like it solved a problem that didn’t exist. A lot of what goes on in this game feels the same way because they made something FUN - smashing the shit out of everything - and the core of the puzzles is taking away your ability to just the smash the shit out of everything. So the puzzles in this level generally still revolve around smashing the shit out of everything, but you are unable to do so until you hit the right switch at the right time. Unnecessary.

I really thought I was right at the tail end but now I’m in another food-themed snacking layer, the Feast Layer, and it DOES feel like an end-game area because I’m now being tasked to use all my weird animal powers to get through it. Hopefully it won’t be much longer now.

Nov 19, 2025 / 9:23 pm

I’m calling a wrap on Donkey Kong Bananza! After beating the boss and learning he was just a placeholder and then chasing the new and real boss through a bunch of hollow earth conspiracy levels and then fighting him 3 or 4 times, I can safely say I’ve seen all I need from this game. No, I did not get the full ending, apparently there is like… a bunch of backtracking you can do and spend some Banana Gems to open up some other levels which lets you earn more bananas and then you and Pauline can live out your domestic fantasy together. But unless it was specifically elephant based levels I don’t need it in my life. So I’m calling it done because I did get the real credits!

Final Thoughts

This was not my favorite game! I’m actually surprised at the turn I took because that opening area was so much fun! The idea that you can smash through any of the scenery and find gold and treasure maps and secret rooms was really appealing. It felt so fresh and new and those first few levels were maybe some of my favorite 3d platforming. When the levels are big and open with layers and floating islands and cavernous underground areas, it plays like no other game! “Hey what’s that over there” BAM SMASH CRASH BOOM you’ve pounded your way through a mount and popped out on the other side. Just incredible! My problem comes with the later levels where they start to strip back these things that I really found exciting. The bird/jungle level puts purple water you can’t touch around a bunch of islands and trees and also throws thorny barriers that you can’t smash through. Oh and don’t go too deep because that poison water? It’s underneath all the ground. They had me believe that a game about punching your way out of any problem or situation would revolve around letting me punch anything and then they kind of just took it away.

There are lots of puzzle types that get peppered in throughout, and they do a pretty some interesting things especially the goo that you punch that make other goo appear in another area. These are fun puzzles, and I like how they revolve around punching. Some puzzles are not punching focused and I didn’t like those as much.

There is also something about the visual style and art direction that I absolutely do not like. I think it has to do with the colors they chose. A lot of times you’ll have soft pastels across an entire landscape, like it was photographed with infrared film, and then clashing on top of that the worst primary colors you’ve ever seen. It hurts my brain to look at. I started to notice it during that horrendous jungle level (again, I know) and by the end of that I had decided that it was just too ugly for me. And I like color! But there is something about their choices that I find bad. This also rolls over to the “clothing” shops, because if I cannot handle these odd color schemes in the environment I certainly am NOT rushing to dye Donkey Kong’s fur neon green or bright blue. The amount of levels where they didn’t offer clothes at the shop and instead just had terrible fur dye colors was very disappointing.

I think the economy of the game was a mess. You have gold. Then there are also these coins. Plus each level/area also has 3 types of unique fossils. At the shops you use gold for items, but not for clothes, that’s reserved for fossils. But gold is also used to recharge your specials… but so is giant fruit? But that fruit doesn’t heal you, only apples do, and apples do not recharge your specials. The coins are used to exchange for banana gems (which you also eat but do not restore your special or health lol) with a guy in each area. Look - this is a silly complaint on my party when these games are literally referred to as “collectathons” but at a certain point it just feels like ideas stacked up on top of each other and nothing is working together.

Every bit of this game has something that makes me shake my fist or my head or that I want to critique because its so all over the place in such insane ways, I really wish that it went farther because then maybe I would be talking about these things that are annoying but they don’t matter because the game goes so hard in other areas that I can overlook them but it doesn’t! It was a constant mine-cart level of frustration from the surface down to the core! I also think as the development of this game went on, they realized the boss and characters they’ve created were not enough of a draw - Void and his cronies are barely a team and pose literally no threat! It feels like there was supposed to be much more of a story there, considering there is all this branding for Void & Co. and it doesn’t feel like he did… anything? And then at the end he shows up, gets his ass whooped by you and on his comeback, gets his ass whooped permanently by King K. Rool who comes out of left field and finally injects some REAL villainous peril into the game.

Have I enjoyed my time with Donkey Kong: Bananza? Mostly. Was it frustrating yet oddly addictive? Yes. I stuck with it because that’s how I play games (for the most part) and when it’s all working together it can be really fun and feel almost innovative. But with the weird puzzles, the odd controls, terrible camera - wait I haven’t talked about the camera have I? When you are underground the camera does this ant-farm thing where everything outside of that level goes dark. It ends up struggling to understand where you are at times - you become obscured, what you’re working towards is hard to see and more often than not it takes control of the camera preventing you from free moving it! It felt similar to how some PS2 games just getting started with free camera movement felt… frustrating!

I don’t want to continue to harp on things I don’t like so I’ll finish up with this: Donkey Kong and his little buddy Pauline were fun to be around, they had a cute relationship and they were never annoying. The colors and art style are not for me and I think a lot of the puzzle designs felt tacked on. Oh and the horrific, cronenberg-esque amalgamations of a gorilla + other animal, anthropomorphized into whatever-the-fuck they were thinking continously makes me shake my head because they are terrible. The zebra? The elephant? The fucking snake?? Okay, I’m going to stop now, I can’t keep talking about this game. My god.

bleets | August 12, 2025

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:59:29 -0700

Immediately after the 4th of July weekend this year my business cranked up to a pace that I’ve not seen in a few years. Suddenly everyone needed their photoshoots done, all right on top of one another. It’s been a fairly furious pace that has completely consumed all of my attention but as I type this I can see the end of the busy season coming near and I’ll be able to properly divide my attention amongst the hobbies and other responsibilities of my life.

bleets | July 08, 2025

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 22:56:32 -0700

I’ve been working my way through Communion, but it’s been kind of a slog! I’ve had it since the beginning of June and have only gotten through around half of it. I need to hunker down and just finish it! It’s hard to balance all of your hobbies! Especially when you have a few too many.

games | Ys 3: Wanderers From Ys

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 22:17:43 -0700

Well guess what? It’s time for Ys 3: Wanderers from Ys! I had to keep going, I’m just not being attracted to any other games at the moment and I really want to see this series through. Once again I’m opting to play the Turbografx version which, now that I’ve spent some time with, feels like maybe not the wisest choice. This game is ported to everything of the era - SNES, Genesis, Famicom - along with NEC’s intrepid console. Of the home console versions in the west, I believe this version is the only one with voice acting… they really lean into the voice acting - more on that later. For now, let the adventure begin!

The big change here is … well, everything, I guess! It’s a side scrolling game, now, with an attack button and jump button. According to the manual you have a few options of attack style. Press the button and Adol swipes his sword out in an arc starting at his face and ending parallel with the ground at waist height. You can jump-slash, you can also crouch-slash which lets you duck and attack enemies that are close to the ground. Lastly there is a downward slash that is supposed to let you get the the drop on an enemy from above. All these moves sort of work in taking down enemies but sometimes it’s hard to know if you’ve hit or been hit because the feedback you get is roughly the same for each. There are a lot of enemies that are low to the ground, requiring you to crouch to attack, there are also enemies that have a projectile or long reaching weapon like a whip that is just too low to be able to crouch under. Everything all together makes the combat feel clunky and perfunctory.

In Ys Books 1 & 2 there was a change at the halfway point of how the magic items would work. In Ys 1 you have a selection of rings on your equipment screen and they each do something to augment Adol’s power - strength, armor, health regeneration, etc. In the second game, rings became an equipable item and your magic was controlled by a variety of staves along with a pool of magic points. Some of those magics would be used slowly and by your hand (like blasting fireballs) but others - like transform and even worse, shield tick away at your magic at a breakneck pace. This is how Ys 3 has chosen to adopt the magic system this go around, rings that perform augmentations on your stats but eat at your magic points - and by Feena do they eat. With a ring equipped you see the magic melt away, with 255 MP, I estimate it would run out in around 180 seconds. This system of consumption is my least favorite - it leaks out no matter what you are doing! One addition to this system is the ability to craft a potion that lets you perform 3 small refills of your MP. Killing enemies does add a few MP back into the till but in my experience its not enough to keep things recharged for good. So far the rings I’ve acquired are shield, power and time. I got the time ring right before a strange boss that had two energy balls quickly rotating around it, one teleported you away, the other was where you were teleported to. This felt like the perfect opportunity (and reason!) to use the time ring, but alas, it had no effect on a boss. Whomp whomp.

Speaking of bosses, the last big change that I’m seeing in the way the game works is you can no longer save in the chamber directly before a boss! It just gives you a no sound when you try to access that menu. However you are now allowed to use healing herbs in the middle of a boss fight as well as reshuffle your equipment. This is a welcomed change! I never understood why you weren’t able to do that in the first two games. So far the bosses have been fairly varied, but in the end they all seem to have a very similar weekness, get right up on them and hit slash as fast possible. There have been teleporting bosses and flying bosses and giant woman that throw knives, but mostly all you need to do is get really close to them and hit them with Adol’s sword as quick as possible. If you start to run low on health hit the run button, heal, and keep going. These fights are mostly about staying alive just a little bit more than your opponent because the end of each fight, Adol gets a fresh stack of XP and health refilled!

Since I’ve already played Oath in Felghana, which is a remake of this game, I’m able to kind of predict the story as it unfolds! Its sort of like watching the high school stage adaptation. The voice acting is terribly over dramataic much more so than the first outing on Turbografx. Not only that, it’s not mixed down very well making lots of very important plot points difficult to hear and understand. I don’t quite get how there is such a huge disparity between the quality of voice acting between these two releases. According to the MobyGames entry there doesn’t seem to be a voice director credited on Ys 3, unlike Ys Book 1 & 2. Perhaps it was a case of “who’s around the office today, we’ve got 40 lines of dialogue we need recorded!” kind of thing. It really is that bad, too! Chester comes out, clears his throat and with his whole ass proclaims “YOU ARE the boy I SAW earlier. What are YOU doing HERE?”

I’ve been working through this game for 2 nights and I’m now in Valestine castle. I’ve still got one armor set to acquire and one more statue to find, but it certainly feels like I’m on the end run. If this game follows a path similar to Felghana, I’ll need to fight something in the castle, yell at King McGuire and then find out we need to head to an island to kill the big bad! I’ll update this more when I find out! Until then here’s some screenshots that make this game look like a buddy comedy between Dogi & Adol.

Jul 9, 2025 / 8:41 pm

Okay I’m straight up not having a great time with this game tonight. Since I last played I had used all of my herbs and crystals, so I’m out of stuff and my health was pretty low. It was low enough that the boss I was standing in front of was too strong, and I keep dying on my out of the castle to try to get to town and refill. I had one option, grind a lot to get up a level while also refilling my magic. Remember earlier I said that killing enemies will also slightly refill your magic? It’s exactly 1 to 1. One bad guy slain and you get 1MP added to your ring. 1MP will heal you for 1HP if you have the heal ring on. Yay. How wonderful. So instead of restarting the game I found a door that had an enemy spawn in front of it and I went in, killed it, healed for 1HP, left. Went in, killed it, healed for 1HP, left. For like 30 minutes.

This got me to 40 or 50HP and allowed me to move back to the boss room, where I did the same thing on a flight of stairs.

Somewhere along the way… I also leveled up and found that I hit the level cap! Already! Apparently level 16 is the limit and I’m there, baby. This all worked out, I defeated the knight-boss that swings two morning-stars at you.

After that, I found the Battle Armor and am now being trounced by ANOTHER boss - this time it’s the wolf guy from Oath in Felghana that I absolutely crushed in one go. Looks like its payback time.

Jul 12, 2025 / 12:13 pm

I got frustrated with that fire boss and took a few days off, I had a pretty big job that took up most of my week. But now that I have a Saturday and some achine muscles I’m going to put this game to bed. I had not attempted to leave the castle since hitting the level cap so I bid the wolf farewell and got back to town to restock. With a full inventory, I made it back to the wolf outsted him in one shot - the magic of the shield ring made it trivial. The rest of the castle didn’t pose too much of a threat, I made my way through it including Merland/Garland.

The final march from Valestine Castle to Sarina had a good pace but it was ruined by the lack of enemies. I thought they’d start to introduce a barrage of smaller enemies that would provide a challenge but each of the new areas felt anemic. I liked the way they handled the dark maze - with your magic light equipped you are met with a sweeping light that scans back and forth through the cave. It illuminates where you are going but still keeps things tense and mysterious. The vision of Adol on his small boat braving the storm was maybe the highlight of the game for me, it was just a cool moment! There are small cutscenes spread out across this game and when they aren’t relying on the terrible V.O. I thought they were well done.

And … that’s credits! The final boss was tough - it was a giant floating thing that shot energy balls in a pattern as it moved back and forth across the screen. I found the Protect ring ate my magic too fast to be useful, so I ended up equipping the Power ring with full magic and keeping the herb in the accessory slot. It took a few tries - lost count after 15 but it wasn’t much more than that. Once you recognize the pattern things become much easier to dodge.

Final Thoughts

Apparently, it’s the Summer of Ys! A title I wish I had come up with sooner! I understand why this is a game that carries with it a dark cloud. It’s short, the magic system is weak and the voice acting is less than good. I still enjoyed my time with it, it continues the lineage of the series and builds up what the first two games started. I enjoyed the addition of Dogi as a companion, Adol deserves a buddy. I would not have believe myself if I read this before playing, but I missed the bump combat! It seems as though Hudson-Soft wanted to add in platforming elements and decided to keep with the times, they needed to shift perspective to side-scroll. And then they mostly forgot about the platforming until the very end of the game. The clocktower (which is represented in Oath very well) brings platforming to the forefront of the gameplay as you need to jump and puzzle your way around some giant gears. It’s mostly successful, though there are jumps that if missed force you to wait around until a moving platform moves back into position. The boss design relied on racing to the bottom of the health pool - I undertand most bosses in video games need you to not die before them - in many of them you could lock into a position and blast them until dead, refilling your health as you go.

I’m excited to see what else this series has in store. I would like to play both iterations of Ys 4 - neither of which officially came west but luckily there are some fan translations available.

Additional Images

bleets | July 06, 2025

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 15:46:52 -0700

It’s been a minute since I’ve given a lot of attention to the website. Sometimes, when something is just purring along in the background you need to let it be, and that’s how I’ve felt about the site recently. I just finished Ys Books 1 & 2 for the TurboGrafx CD and made my final update about it. Mostly, Catrena and I have been busting our asses at cleaning, downsizing and organizing the house. We’ve been in this space for 9 years and since our primary source of income is finding, buying or making everyday-to-weird stuff for other people, we can accumulate a lot of crap we don’t know what to do with and feel bad about disposing of. Part of this has also included a massive reorganization of the garage which I will probably make a post about in the future. That’s all to say I didn’t lose any fingers over this past holiday weekend, though we don’t really have a lot to celebrate these days. I did go to a pool party that had a hot dog roller machine, which was maybe the highlight of my month? It affected me deeply and now I think every party should include one of these. More posts eventually, hopefully you are reading this through RSS or, better yet, visiting this site after getting notified via RSS and reading it here. Like a cool person who can cook 12 hot dogs at a time. Until then!

games | Ys: Book 1 & 2

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 20:04:16 -0700

I couldn’t stay away. I’ve been thinking about starting Ys from the beginning since finishing Oath in Felghana last night. A few days ago I booted up my thin client and popped Ys 1 for DOS onto it and tested the waters. If the music was better I might have stuck with it, but since I wanted that full FM synth sound and updated voice acting, I’m opting to play the TurboGrafx 16 version.

Let's Go!

Right away I’m enjoying the graphics and story. The first town I was dropped off in, Minea, is bustling! Lots of people walking around ready to give you a quick bit of information or drop some gossip in your lap. In true Ys fashion, these asides are hints of things to come. If you stumble into the fortune teller’s house (Sara) she’ll give you a task - outfit yourself as a swordsman - buy a sword, shield and armor. With the gold you start with you’ll only have enough for two of the three, so out to the field to practice, grind and save. The bump combat took a minute to get used to - after all we’re conditioned to DODGE enemies, especially if we cannot attack.

I’ve found that it’s also not as simple as moving into the same space as an enemy. If you come from behind you will always hit and not take damage. if you turn tail and run at the wrong moment you will certainly take damage, assuming you aren’t heavily over leveled. There are some audio cues at work as well - if you take damage or block, if the enemy takes damage or block, it helps make this system actually satisfying to engage with! Once I had my gold and a few levels I made my way back towards town … and promptly died. Some enemies are stronger than others and I wasn’t paying attention at what I was bumping into - let that be a lesson! Keep an eye on your enemies! It didn’t take me long to push myself back up three levels and get my gold again. THIS TIME I saved and got back to town.

There are three stores in Minea, a hospital that sells supplies, a weapons dealer and an armor dealer. There is also a bar where you can have a drink with these hot studs:

We saw you from across the bar and really dig your vibe

After the gear is acquired, be sure to equip it and go talk to Sara the Fortune Teller. She’ll inform you to go see someone in the next town, her aunt Jeba. If you’ve been talking to people in town they’ll point to the gravel road out of town - follow this and you’ll find the village of Zepik. I like how many resources this game spends on making sure there is just enough information so it doesn’t feel obtuse. Zeba informs you that you need to find the 6 books of Ys to stave off something terrible from happening and the first is in the shrine to the north. Excitedly, I head north, find the shrine - things are really starting to cook now. We’ve got a dungeon!

The dungeon is broken up into screens and areas connected by hallways and warping statues. You can walk around a screen going between doorways and rooms and hallways seeing treasure chests or doors but it’s a puzzle to figure out how to get there. There are plenty of enemies moving around the dungeon, as well. Interestingly the enemies spawn at random so unlike a Zelda game, you can never clear out a room - there will always be enemies in it. After moving through a floor of the dungeon and being rejected by a number of locked chests I found the first boss! I’ve been very interested in how the boss battles were going to work with bump combat. In later Ys games magic projectiles play a big roll in fighting the bosses so I wanted to see the sprouts of those battles. The first boss is a wizard that appears and disappears throughout a room that is being blasted randomly by beams of fire. Dodge the fire, bump the wizard - easy, right? It should have been! But the fire is pretty random and I could only get hit a few times. It didn’t take too long but I had to restart a few times. Luckily you can save almost anywhere and when you die instead of going through a game over / main menu, the game puts you right back to the last save point. Its very respectful of your time in that way.

Your reward for taking care of this is a shrine key which lets you unlock a few cells - inside one is a prisoner - a girl! She’s extremely worried about all the goons in the world, something other girls have expressed concern over too! What’s with all the gooning?!

Hey, whoa, hey what's that?

This was the first hour or so of this game. And it really hooked me in! There were a few story beats after this (Feena goes to hang out with Zeba while she tries to regain her memories). I’ve pushed back into the shrine and went down another floor - I found a key which unlocks the treasure chests! This was good motivation to go back through the few floors to make sure I’ve gotten all the chests, they all contained some equipment - one of which is a mask you need to equip in order to reveal a hidden doorway which helps you get to the next boss! It’s little touches like this that help keep this world feeling alive and mysterious. The final boss of the shrine was this centipede looking thing that took me a minute to beat. When I first got to it I had 15HP left - in order to kill this thing you have to bump it anywhere that isn’t it’s gnashing maw! No projectiles flying the room this time - the only thing you have to dodge is the face but it’s tough! This thing moves extremely erratically.

It’s an enjoyable game loop so far. I beat the boss, went back to town - things have changed! Sara is missing! I have to talk to a poet! Zeba has a roommate now! I bought new armor and set out to the next location. This next section takes place in an abandoned mine and I think I know where it is. I’ve got some choice equipment and a bit of gold so I’m feeling confident I’m ready to move on. Tomorrow? WE EXPLORE THE MINES!

Jun 23, 2025 / 9:40 pm

I spent some time this evening exploring the mines on the north side of the main field. I had to level up a few times to keep from being squashed. The mines are dark, confusing and full of weird monsters that like the deflect my attacks. For stages like this, I try to hug a wall and ride it in one direction until that area has been exhausted. The first branch I came to I decided to head south and to the right, after a few minutes I managed to get to my first dead end and was rewarded with the silver armor! From there I started to work my way back and through the rest of the mine, uncovering chests and secrets along the way. During this venture I would continue to head outside because in the field, your health regenerates! This is useful if the whole “staying alive” thing is part of your primary objective.

The fun thing about the Ys series, even up through the more modern games, is that you can go about your business adventuring and then pop back into town to talk to people and you’ll start clearing sidequests. I wound up going back to both towns after getting into the second floor of the dungeon to grab some supplies, in doing so I found out I had a few things people in town were looking for. I also went by the Roda tree’s and found the silver sword!

I haven’t clicked with a game this old this quick in a long time. I’m not adverse to playing old games but sometimes, especially after a longer stint of modern games, it can be hard to get back to the conventions of older games. But something about this game! If this had random, turn based battles I can’t imagine I would be this excited about it.

After the mines I cleaned up some side stories, equipped all of my shining new *silver gear* and got the OK to head towards *Darm Tower*! I wanted to investigate the entrance to this and see what it was all about but in doing so, I got pushed in and you can't go back! The tower was built with a one way door so once you are in... you're in.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

Be sure to buy the gear one-step below the silver! You don't know it now, but you'll need it later!

The tower is exactly what you’d expect - it’s cold, full of strong monsters and confusing. There are floors with exits and entrances and an outdoor balcony that lets you rotate around the tower, often with doors on the opposite side. And surprise! some evil force set a trap for us and dropped us in the dungeon and - oh no! My silver gear is gone! This part starts to get progressively harder because I did not! follow my own tip, since I found the silver shield and armor pretty early on… I’m stuck using pretty crappy stuff during this part. If I can manage to level up high enough, I should be able to get through and hopefully get my gear back? But that’s a task for tomorrow.

Jun 24, 2025 / 12:36 pm

I had some time this morning and decided to spend it trapsing through Darn tower! I was right, I did in fact get my gear back - 2/3rds of it, anyway. I’m currently on the hunt for the silver armor. I had a run-in with a particularly fickle boss, a praying mantis looking thing that required me to level up twice in order to walk away victorious. I don’t mind grinding out levels in this game because it never takes too long and it isn’t so mindless that it shuts my brain down. You still have to pay attention, I’m still swapping between rings (power -> armor -> healing) and saving. And the levels really do make a difference so its worth doing!

There was one obtuse puzzle that I didn’t quite understand. After beating the mantis it rewarded me with another Book of Ys and a hammer! I had no idea what to do with the hammer since there hasn’t been any indication that something could be done with it. No cracks in the walls or floors, nobody said anything about it. I found a hallway that drained my health and something called the evil ring - which, according the og manual “Helps Adol to get through certain areas” … but not this area apparently. Equipping the evil ring did nothing. One of the prisoners I met in the tower mentioned a special broach but I didn’t have that at the time. I walked around hitting random things and after a while of that… I looked it up. Apparently there is a guy that is supposed to mention something about a pilar and an evil song that drains your life, but I never found him (worrying). But the solution to this is to bash an evil pilar on the balcony of the 11th floor and that stops the music. Who knew! Hey, if this is the first thing I’ve had to look up in a game this old, I think we’re doing great.

I’m now stuck in a maze of mirrors with the aforementioned broach, but I’m not sure what to do or how to do it, I keep teleporting through the mirrors but can’t figure out if the broach is helping or not. I’m going to put this down and come back to it tonight and see if I can’t figure it out.

Jun 24, 2025 / 9:21 pm

This amulet is a bridge too far.

So…… a very annoying thing happened to me during my ascent to the tower! I’ve been traipsing around this damned place and in the back of my mind I’m remember some of the lore that’s been said. At some point one of the guys in the tower talks about a “magical blue amulet” that will “break the curse” of evil - or something like that. And a while ago, like 10 floors ago, I found a “blue necklace” - I had assumed this was the blue amulet! But apparently it. is. not. So here I am, on the top of the tower, in front of the door to a room that probably contains the final boss… and I can’t open it. I need that blue amulet! I think what I need to do is go back to talk to one of those guys, maybe Luta, now that I’ve got the glasses that translate the Books of Ys. I have to go back down from the top of the tower, through two different mirror maze rooms.. it’s going to be like an hour of going down… if you know what I mean. I’ll get to it tomorrow, and I’ll share more of exploits from today then.

Wrong, game, Lair.

Jun 25, 2025 / 8:12 pm

Okay. Back through the 9 floors, the catwalks, the mirror mazes and through the tunnel-that-kills-you and down the stairs I reached the right side of the 11th floor where the famed, supposed somnambulist - Luta - was hanging out. SHOCKED! He was, to see that I’ve unearthed yet another book of Ys, so surprised in fact, he gave me a family heriloom, the goddamned blue amulet. Thanks, my friend, I hope your leg gets better.

Now that I’m standing in front of this previously locked door, ready to go in, I’m nervous! What if I’m not high enough level? What’s waiting for me in there? I think the evil guy’s name is Dark Fact - which is such a cool name, by the by - and he wears a shining cape.

Wish me luck.

Jun 25, 2025 / 8:54 pm

… Dark Fact is dead, he’s been vanquished! His hubris was no match for my silver equipment (thanks for the tip Lair!) plus I imagine my grinding on the way back from the quest for the elusive Blue Amulet left me at an advantageous level. His fight had a cool conceit - He flies around the void, shooting out round projectiles that then explode into a starburst pattern, making more round projectiles. If you make contact with the boss, a square of energy removes a tile of the floor. I don’t know if he had any other tricks because I was very strong and killed him … fast.

The next 3-4 minutes are so fucking cool that it made me sit back and swear out loud. These were two games and they managed to bridge them with some of the sickest animation, pixel graphics and music I’ve ever seen in a game. It was an incredible feat that puts you right back in the action. I’m now on the top of a floating island, having been rescued by a doe-eyed beauty who ran across a grassy field to save me! I’m going to keep going with this to see how the series developed from the first to second game.

Jul 6, 2025 / 12:02 pm

I’m back with an update - I’ve completed book 2, rolling credits on the entire game! I haven’t posted any follow-ups since finishing Ys 1, as I’ve been busy and wanted to chip away at the game without distraction.

Immediately upon starting the second half this game - which I’ll refer to as Ys 2 - there are a few noticeable differences. The biggest is the addition of an MP meter. No longer are you told how much XP you need to your next level at a quick glance, this is moved to the status menu. Adol no longer is saddled to bump and grind his way through the dungeons and shrines that await him, shortly after embarking on this new journey you gain fire magic! Adol has a projectile now! He can shoot fireballs while walking towards his enemies. This is a great addition to the core gameplay mechanics as it brings with it new and interesting interactions with bosses, enemies and the world! Bosses can now be designed with this vulnerability in mind. The world can contain barriers that need to be blasted out of the way and enemies can be pushed back, away from Adol, as a form of crowd control. The shooting mechanic works excellent and as you grow stronger, level by level, so does your magic. Towards the end of the game you’ll notice your magic pushing enemies further and for longer. That same kind of consistent damage attachment that happens to Adol is now happening to goons pushing them towards the end of the screen. It’s a good mechanic that helps make the back-half of the games combat more interesting.

This system also knocked out the various rings to your inventory instead of being lumped in with your equipment - magic staffs come with abilities that you select and, like fire, can be triggered with a button press… if they are not passive magics. This is where the line between magic rings from Ys 1 blurs with magic staves from Ys 2, some of them are passive magic that just work in the background, magic like shield, transform and time stop and light are active as soon as their staves are equipped. Only fire and return are activated with the press of a button. The rings in this game are also different, gone are the strength, heal and protection rings that proved vital in navigating the tower (especially when your high-powered gear was stolen!). The rings in this game are much more vague in description and only affect your magic consumption, movement speed and a secret, third thing that helps with the boss. There is a cape that will heal you but in my play through I did not find that! This change does a lot to make the stakes of this second phase, Ys 2 feel much higher, as there isn’t as regimented a loop, especially since the level design is far more purposefully confusing. No longer are you able to reach a higher level and then progress down to a floor where the enemies get progressively harder. Now you are in winding dungeons where the structure folds in on itself, offering few dead ends to check off your own lists, and instead offering room after room filled with multiple doors and branching pathways. From the first sacred area you visit this level design is made abundantly clear and becomes much more confusing, so much so that I devised a system of note-taking to keep track of where I had been and where I was going.

As you push through the game it becomes apparent that all of these changes were devised to build the last half of this game, a giant labyrinth of doorways, rooms, bridges, tunnels and levels that span across the world multiple screens tall and wide - the Solomon Shrine and Canals. This area is where you spend the entire second half of the game, and you do a lot of it… as a demon. That’s right, not unlike the mirror world in A link to the Past, poor Adol needs to navigate much of this confusing area as his little, yellow kangaroo persona, tricking goons into letting him into unauthorized areas, getting security credentials and gathering intel.

This entire section took the game we’ve been playing, and turned it around. No more were the goons these lifeless drones hell-bent on destruction, suddenly we are examining them, listening to the inner workings of their society, getting information from them - they are sentient creatures! And while the game doesn’t go much further than that, and it certainly doesn’t intentionally raise any moral questions about if it’s right or wrong to slay them, it does turn the entire genre up on end. The beginning part of this section is best played entirely using your transform magic, as most of the enemies are too strong to best reliably. The better gear and higher levels you receive as you progress will make that a relatively trivial problem later on… but before you can even get to that point Adol is transformed PERMANENTLY into yet another gruesome demon! That’s right, as punishment for his spying, a curse was placed upon him, interrupting his journey and causing him to reach out to some friendly villagers for help.

Help! I'm a GOON!

The game has a great story progression, where they use a threat of constant impending doom to keep building on tension, without resorting to something like time limits or a stranglehold on resources. In the first section you are told of a villager who is sick and needs her medicine, here outside of Solomon Shrine in Ramia Village you are told villagers are kidnapped and executed as a sacrifice. As you storm a bell tower you are told that on the fifth toll the next sacrifice will occur and as you move through levels and doorways the chimes continue to come! Of course this is all part of the story, but it helps to keep you focused and pulled taught to your goals. Its constantly building. The big, beautiful ensemble cast of the first game continues on into the second and stacks right on top. By the end of the game Adol has saved the entire cast of a small play and they all come out for their own curtain call.

My biggest complaints about the second game is the lack of any kind of map. The shift in level design really would have lent itself to having access to one, even if it were to come in the manual. I ended up using this hand-drawn map & guide to help me navigate the very confusing Solomon Shrine and a some of the subsequent canals. These spaces look so similar that it became impossible for me to recognize where I was, especially if I had to put the game down or take a break to be a normal, functioning adult human. The lack of visual differentiation between the east, west and mid sections and in order to get from the west to the east you may need to go west first and get onto one of the many different levels or in through a doorway which leads to a series of hallways that spit you out somewhere else - it’s a labyrinth without bisexual rockstars or muppets.

After more days than I would have liked of bumbling around, I made it to the next part, what would ultimately be the finale, and I was able to get my bearings and a warp point and take care of a few last minute things. Getting new herbs, finding the final pieces of gear, you know, Ys stuff. The last boss in this game was so goddamned hard I must have attempted him at least 50 times, I think possibly even 100. He’s carrying the fabled black pearl and in order to do damage to him, you must bump him, he’ll turn into the pearl, and you bump that. But he’s blasting energy orbs at you in a random pattern while teleporting all around the screen also at random. Even with the full line of Cleria tools, shield magic and the goddess ring equipped, I would also run out of health before him. I’d get REAL close but never close enough. So after my upteenth time I decided I needed to push Adol to the final level. I needed 3500 XP to get to 99999 XP and gain the final level. 30 minutes later I was able to beat the boss in one shot. Never underestimate one level in Ys, I tell you.

Final Thoughts

When thinking about the first Ys, and it’s humble starts on the PC-88 computer system, it becomes an incredible feat that it even made it to the west. I don’t know of a lot of games that made that transition, let along went one to build a company and a multi-decade long series. While what I played here is not the first game as it was originally intended, instead a port of two Falcom games made by Hudson-Soft for an NEC backed home console, it maintains the story and spirit of the first game. One day I’ll play the very original edition of Ys, but until then this compilation of the two has cemented the series as one of my very favorite. The bump combat system working in conjunction with the magic rings and areas of rest let you interact with the world in a way that I’ve never bonded with in a game of this age before. Watching that system evolve in ways I could never predict, abandoning these rings for types of magic I’d never predict was fascinating! What’s more is that these systems worked, not just for the game but for the world, the story and all the frictions and systems that came along for the ride.

I wish I had played this sooner. A few years ago I played through a few games that could be considered “Zelda-Likes”, both Beyond Oasis and Crusader of Centy, and I found myself getting frustrated by their design language. They had a specific way they wanted to interpret the gameplay, how they handled health and items and weird little guys. I ended up enjoying my time with both of them, but I didn’t fall in line with them, I kept knocking elbows against them. This did not happen with Ys. It was familiar, it was comfortable, not say that it was easy (ys-y?)! Because there is plenty of challenge to be found between them, but the challenges that come aren’t from bygone conventions of game-making, at least not entirely, the challenges come from well designed games with kick-ass music and an incredible cast of characters that are all working in unison to deliver a coherent well crafted story. Play Ys. Then play Ys 2, and all the Ys. Even if you start with the latest entry, just get some Ys into your system. Until next time, Adol, I look forward to another adventure.

Final Image Gallery

bleets | June 22, 2025

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:29:16 -0700

Okay now with Oath of Felghana finished I’m ravenous for more Ys so I think I’m going to watch through the 1989 anime of the same name, Ys! I put this on the plex server a few years ago but I never got very far into it, I think I was working on something. I also am ready to play through the first 2 games in their original form, possibly the TurboGrafx-CD versions, though I did boot up the HP Thin Client and installed the first game’s DOS port. The sound is very bad on that version, though, it’s nostalgic for sure, but its just PC speaker beeps. Ys has such a rich history of music starting with the PC98 FM Sound that it almost feels like a disservice. Hmm… no matter which version I play, I’m going to get some bump combat!

blog | Happy Cyberbuffalo Day!

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:17:45 -0700

Happy Birthday, CyberBuffalo

On this day in 2024 CyberBuffalo Industries was officially (re)launched! It’s amazing, isn’t it? To go from a bunch of scrappy, poorly written HTML pages to the glimmering diamond in the rough of anti-corporate internet you see before you… why, it’s almost enough to bring a tear to this techno-junkie’s eye. And why shouldn’t it?! We should be able to revel in our achievements, no matter how small - mundane - immaterial - insignificant - trivial it may be in the shadow of the collapse of modern man. So here, on June 20th, a year after beginning this journey I just wanted to say “good job” and “keep going” to none other than myself because we all could use a little encouragement from time to time. If you’re out there, somewhere in cyberspace drifting, feeling lost and alone, just remember you can grab onto a jettisoned scrap of lost bandwidth and begin to send out SOS help signals using any tools within reach of your grubby little mitts. And I encourage you to do so. Send out an SOS and you may be surprised who will respond. From everyone here at CyberBuffalo Industries I just wanted to say thank you!

Drop me your sos here cyb3rbuffalo@gmail.com.

games | Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:16:49 -0700

Let There Be Ys!

With Yakuza 4 done, Monster Hunter out of steam and Onimusha 2 on indefinite hiatus, I wanted something to play before Donkey Kong Bananza comes out next month. I want to play Daemon x Machina before the sequel comes out this fall but I don’t have a copy of that. Instead of looking at my BOMBS25 Chart, which would sensible, I decided to grab a copy of Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana off the shelf. I’ve wanted to play this game for a while, I’ve also coveted the collector’s edition on the PSP for some time but its always been more expensive than I thought it should be. So when Falcom announced the remaster of The Oath in Felghana I jumped on the reasonably priced collector’s edition. That edition is put together well, though I wish it came with an art book, even a small one, rather than the postcards. The included fold-up manual is also a great addition. Now, enough about the feelies, on to the game!

Title Screen

I’ve played 3 other Ys games, before this, Ys Origin, Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim and finally, Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I liked all three! Felghana is a remake of the 1990 CRPG Ys III: Wanderers from Ys. I am not brave enough (or patient enough?) to have played the original Ys games, though they are on my list (and apparently they’ve all been released on Switch as part of the EGGCONSOLE series, but not in English). In 2005 they remade that third game as Ys: Oath in Felghana, first released on Windows and then finally in 2010 on PSP. And this is what Ys Memoire: Oath in Felghana is a remaster of! So far I’m liking the remaster options, it doesn’t really get in the game’s way. There are also options to swap the music around, from the orchestral arrangements (which are great) all the way back to the PC88 game (which is also kick-ass). They’ve also created all new character portraits, which is less interesting to me, but you do get some incredible gems like these… (original on the left).

Let the adventure begin!

I like this series because these are big, grand, epic adventures that aren’t 120 hours long. According to IGN Owned (and filled with cookies and trackers) howlongtobeat.com this game reaches 13-15 hours depending on how much grinding and backtracking you need to do. Right away we’re dropped off our boat and immediately get tossed into the action. Wolves are attacking some poor defenseless maiden, oh no! Adol to the rescue! After the dust settles we learn that Dogi is from here and knows everyone. He, of course, will soon go out to run some errands and we will have to fend for ourselves. The first dungeon is inside the towns main source of income, the Ravol Mines. This game has showed a fair amount of enemy variety so far, which I like. There are flying enemies, ground enemies - some of them you need to use magic to kill - it’s a nice variety. Of the games I’ve played in this series, they all include a fair amount of platforming and exploration, and this game is no different. You’ll also notice this game is fully 3D and while it mostly presents itself as a mixture of top-down and isometric, but since we’re not working with pre-rendered backgrounds it can move the camera around and play with angles and scale.

In the first dungeon, the mines, there is a huge boss, Ellefale: the Azure Queen of Death! When you walk into her chamber we’re no longer top-down, instead it’s more over-the-shoulder, the camera moves around the room and follows Adol in from behind, and then the subsequent fight takes place in that same viewpoint! It forces you to think quick and adapt your play-style, but its not enough of a departure that it feels disorienting. Speaking of bosses, holy shit I forgot how difficult these games can be. I almost started this on hard but I’m so glad I didn’t. Though, when a death occurs - and this may be a product of the remaster - it gives you the option to tweak the difficulty.

So far, I’m through the first and second dungeon, I’ve got two of the four statues that are needed to do or prevent something, I’m not entirely sure what the story is leading up to just yet. In those 2 dungeons I’ve fought 5 bosses - and I’ve had to restart each of them at least 5 times each. This game really forces you to study the moves, memorize the patterns and do everything correct the first time… or else. They bosses attack hard and quick, they are unforgiving. For instance, there is a dragon that flies out of a pit of lava that we’re walking through and while its move set is not complicated, if it catches you just right, you can get stuck on it’s nose and since there are no i-frames in this game, you’re health could drain down in about 2 seconds.

Not having any kind of invulnerability after taking damage pushes this game from a simple action/adventure game and makes it into something more akin to a shoot-em-up. You have to be precise in movements, you need to recognize what the boss is going to do before they do it and get yourself into the right defensive position. To me, this isn’t as frustrating or challenging as something like Devil May Cry because it’s only requiring half the skill. Adol doesn’t have a deep bench or a complicated move set so you can kind of hack away. Sometimes you’ll need to mix in his magic abilities, and knowing when to activate Boost versus when to save it for later.

What’s Next?

Tonight I finished off the second dungeon and got through some story stuff which then left me to run around the map and revisit some areas looking for secrets. Since I’m half-way through I’ve increased my abilities and now have access to double jump which means I can get back to areas I wasn’t allowed in before. Tomorrow I’m going back to town to upgrade my armor and then I’ll set off to find the third statue!

Jun 20, 2025 / 7:46 pm

You know the phrase “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions?” Well that’s been my playthrough of Oath and my ability to properly come back and update these posts. I’ve certainly been meaning to come write down where I’m at, but each time I do I open the game to check to see what I’m doing and I end up getting sucked in. This game has been great in short bursts, once I got over the fear of exploration. Something I forgot about with Ys games? They can be hard as balls. They have a lot in common with shmups so occassionally you will have to best a boss that is just blasting out projectiles in crazy patterns. And you know? That rules.

Since I’ve updated this last, I’ve made it through all four dungeons and gotten all 4 statues and worked my way through the fifth - the castle. The fourth was making my way up to the mountains to search out Dogi’s old master, Berhardt, how has more information on the insanity that’s happening on the island. Up in the mountains’ dungeon you can find a pair of heavy boots that let you run around on the ice. Later in the game - in fact its in the next dungeon - you fight an enemy slug-thing that leaves a toxic trail of slippery slime. If you equip those boots you are able to subvert that trap! It’s a pretty cool use of tools and something that’s not really telegraphed, so - much like the rest of the game - you are rewarded for looking around and following your instincts.

There were three bosses up there in the mountains, a trio of Harpy’s that each took a different element or your sword to beat, a weird ice-worm thing that reminded me of the latest iterations of like-likes and a huge ice dragon named Gildias. Sometimes this throws a boss at you without warning. You’ll hit a save point and will walk to the next screen and boom - boss fight. Luckily, so far, anyway, the boss fights do come after save points which means you’ll be healthy and able to restart.

Between each dungeon I’ve been running back to old areas to try to grab things that I remembered not being able to get at the time. I now have a cape that lets me heal while standing still, kind of like that item in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. This also gives me opportunity to make sure my equipment is fully upgraded and to see if there are any sidequests ready to check off in town. If you see someone with an (!) over their head, that means they are ready to talk and / or give you something. I hadn’t been looking up sidequests really but now that I’m at the end of the game I’ve noticed that I missed a few things and took a peak at guide. There are indeed timed quests that you can miss if you don’t do them before certain acts. At the end of the mountain dungeon there was a plot beat that was so shocking that it made me drop my switch! The story in this game is actually quite good.

The fifth dungeon was up at Valestein castle, the count has built a giant clocktower and it appears that he and Chester are using it for some kind of ritual. This dungeon is great! It’s a big castle that has a walkway between the wings that needs to be unlocked. So when you work your way through one side and solve everything and beat everything you get to do it again in reverse. It’s not quite as dramatic as SotN, but it made for good set pieces. This dungeon is where the platforming really came into its own. Big chambers with precision jumping, if you fall you end up in the basement and you have to fight your way out. There were lots of goodies to be found as well - some requiring you to take a big leap of faith off beyond the edges of the screen.

I’m working on getting to an island off the coast of Felghana now - the site of a terrible tragedy which consumed an entire village, including the families of Chester and Elena. I believe I’m in the final throes of the game and look forward to seeing how insane the final boss is going to be (spoiler, it’s going to be nuts) and seeing the story through to the end. Wish me luck.

Jun 21, 2025 / 8:08 pm

Last night I made it to the island! The first thing to greet me was a small boss fight and a new betrayal. This games story continues to keep me on my toes. As I pressed my way into the dungeon I realized that its going to be big and confusing, so I’ve been taking my time. I’ve died a few times merely because some of these rooms throw a lot of enemies at you all at once - it can get chaotic and its easy to lose track of health. In my journey, I’ve found a hammer which I need to bring back to the mainland for Adonis as well as 2 of the 3 gems I was missing, and a butt load of raval. I don’t know how far into the dungeon I am because it’s fairly large, big rooms with floors you can fall through and long, weaving walkways that span multiple screens. What I haven’t found yet, is a save / warp point - I’m eager to drop off this hammer.

Jun 22, 2025 / 8:26 am

And that’s a wrap on Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana! I had every intention of just navigating through the dungeon, finding the first save point and stopping - and I did that, but my nosiness got the best of me and I poked my head into the adjacent room and triggered a cutscene that led me into the final boss. And it whipped my ass pretty fast. I wasn’t ready! I was level 49 and wanted to make some moves so I reloaded my save in the hopes of cleaning up some loose ends.

First - I needed to drop off that hammer. It turns out this lets Adonis make powerful armor without destroying the precious Raval ore. Providing him the hammer and 1000 ore (I was swimming in it) got me, in return, a Raval Shield! I had already upgraded the sword fully and I found the Raval Armor in one of my many loops around the dungeon which I was able to upgrade also once. I needed 1000 Raval to complete the set and I had an idea of where to go. There was a weird dead-end in the lava zone that I never went back to investigate and I hoped I could use my dash to bust through the door and sure enough! Success! A few hundred Raval. It put me on track but I still needed more. Luckily some of the enemies in the final area drop raval which meant I could grind it out, also solving my second problem - I was only level 49 and I wanted to be over 50.

To the dungeon! I don’t fully understand how this game scales with leveling - you could be getting hit for 45 damage, level up, then get hit by the same enemy for 1 damage. Knowing this I wanted to give myself the advantage and push my level up to 51, which took about an hour of grinding on the couch. As you scale up the amount of XP you get goes down so it take longer to level at higher levels.

The last thing I wanted to wrap up was to try to grab the last few piece of equipment. I was missing the third ruby for my fire ring and I never completed a Raval trading quest in town - I’ll come back to this. The ruby I had to look up, I couldn’t suss out where and when I had missed it and I’m happy I did because it was tucked away in such a random place in the Clocktower I would have never found it on my own.

Back to the trading quest - there is a guy in town that wants you to sell him Raval. Originally I was ignoring him because it felt like Raval was in short supply and its the primary thing you need to level up your equipment. With an inventory of fully upgraded stuff I had nothing else to do with Raval and I dumped it on him. He gave me a jade ring that some guy in the tavern had been complaining about losing and in turn, he gave me a THE TALISMAN OF WAR! This handy thing extends the length of your special boost mode, and I wish I had it earlier. There was only one thing to do now. Finish this.

Everything in it's right place!

The final boss, the ancient evil force of Galbalan, is big and imposing and makes you bob and weave your way to victory. While it doesn’t require you using EVERY trick in your bag, it does force you to stay quick on your feet. He sits just off the far platform, you need to shoot its head with a fireball to get his mouth (?) to open and reveal a giant eyeball. Occasionally it will fire out ice platforms that float up and you can use them to position yourself to start the attack. This is the basic theory behind this fight and while you are attempting to do this, Galbalan is using every trick in the book to stop you - an array of lasers, rotating round projectiles, giant energy balls, the works! It forces you to be fast and quick and level headed. Eventually it will start to use its hands which you can attack and this was the key to my victory. With only a few hundred hp left, I hit my boost and went in for the kill on the hands and came out victorious! Honestly it wasn’t THAT difficult a fight. I think there were others that in the game, maybe Death Faleon or Gyalva that were more difficult. But the build-up, set pieces, music and aura of it all made it really impactful. The final bits of story play out fairly predictably, which didn’t make me immune from the bittersweet feelings of a journey coming to an end and remembering those you’ve lost along the way.

Final Thoughts

That’s a wrap on Ys: Oath in Felghana! It’s a cool game that does a lot of things that I like, including never holding back the challenges. I find it unusual for an ARPG to push forward at such a pace, but this game never really slows down. From the moment Dogi and Adol step off the boat, you get thrown directly into the action and the story begins to unfold. There are moments where you need to pul yourself from the action to talk to people in the town or upgrade your equipment, or even go to a different dungeon to get something you couldn’t before. The meat of the fun of Ys, to me, is that unlike Link or other top-down action-adventure protagonists, Adol has a good set of sword-based moves & combos that can be strung together to take care of the bad guys. Slash, double slash, rising slash, power-slam, triple-slash - for a top-down action game they really put a lot into his move-set, which is great because he has no defensive moves whatsoever. I often found myself looking for a block or a dash/roll to get me out of harms way, but you must rely on jumping and moving only for that. This takes a bit to get used to especially since, as I brought up during the Lava-Dragon fight, you get no invincibility after taking damage. You really need to stick and move - relying on combos and jumping and stunning enemies using your downward thrust move combined with your 3 magic abilities (fire, wind and earth). I’m mostly talking about the average run of the mill enemies as the bosses take their own tactics.

Speaking of bosses - imagine if a Zelda game that had 4 distinct dungeons gave you 15 unique boss fights. Dularn and Chester you fight twice, but both fights are very different so even they don’t feel like they are rehashing a lot. I don’t think the people over at Falcom understand the difference between a mid-boss and regular boss because some of these take place in the middle of a dungeon and could be just as difficult as the one waiting for you at the end. Honestly the only boss I managed to kill in my first go was this werewolf thing, Zellfel Zam Schultiger. It has an easy pattern and while I was close to death I managed to get through it without needing to start over. The boss fights are also cool because they take advantage of the 3D engine, allowing each fight to feel unique through a combination of mechanics and perpsective. Some of them you fight head on, some are in arena’s, others take place as a side scroller - it was exciting to see the ways they could shuffle their deck to provide a new or unique experience.

I’d always heard that Oath in Felghana represented the best of classic Ys games and now the experience is behind me I understand why. It has a very mature story with plenty of twists turns oohs and aah to keep things interesting, a moveset that makes the platforming feel tight and fun and plenty of bosses to keep you sharp. I think it’s time to really invest some time in the series as a whole and go back to where it all started. If you are looking for an adventure, something to thoughtful and twitchy, Oath should meet all the requirements.

bleets | June 14, 2025

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 20:07:15 -0700

Oh no, I’m thinking about playing an Ys game! I haven’t played one since Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I didn’t play Monstrum Nox on Switch because apparently it ran terribly but I’m hearing rumblings that’s its running much better on Switch 2. That’d be a good background game to have going for a while. I could also play Oath in Felghana, that’s also on Switch. Or maybe fuck it and I’ll finally play Daemon x Machina. HMMMMM.

bleets | June 12, 2025

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 19:22:47 -0700

It’s official, I know too much about Law & Order. I’m on season 18 after starting at 1. I haven’t watched the made-for-tv movie, yet, that was made during the Chris Noth years. I should have been reviewing each year but I didn’t start this thinking I was going to get sucked into it as much as I have been. Maybe I’ll do a ranking of seasons and characters when I’m all done. Whatever I end up doing, I’m enjoying S18 more than I expected, but its still a more sterile than the earlier seasons.

games | Mario Kart World

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:16:04 -0700

Welcome, race fans, to the big show! That’s right we’re talking about Mario Kart World, Nintendo’s Switch 2 launch game that promises to shake things up for the series. And shake them up they should, considering the last game, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, was a port of a Wii U launch game, first appearing on the neglected console way back in 2014. Think about how much has changed in the last 11 years! That game gets ported to Switch, the reception was okay because only 14 million Wii U’s were sold ever, so it gave LOTS of people a chance to play a great Mario Kart with added (and improved) features. Then, after some years, much like the elastic band on your favorite sweat pants, Nintendo stretched that game out with new content - 50 characters and 96 courses, multiple single and multiplayer modes and an online community that has been creating tournaments and setting up races to this day. What a legacy! How do you top that?

Explore The World

How? With Mario Kart World! It’s a big game that crashed onto the scene at a whopping $80, signalling a new lane for video game pricing to merge into. Is it worth that? A lot of this game is Mario Kart at its best; all new levels, lots of items, a great character roster and solid online play. The big addition to the game is the seemless, open world full of challenges and the all new Knockout Tour! You are no longer being accosted by a tormented Lakitu going ballistic because you are going the wrong way or no longer on the track - with MKW’s free roam mode you are free to move around as you please. It’s pretty amazing! You are able to move around this large map exploring each of the 32 new tracks, the space around them, the nooks and crannies that would normally get you penalized for falling into as well as the vast open world between them.

Challenges

Along with the exploration, there are tons of challenges to be found. You’ll see these P switches spread out across the map - some in desolate, hard to reach areas (getting to them is the challenge), others slapped right down in the middle of a course. Hit it and begin a challege. So far in my playthrough, I’ve seen seen a variety of these challenges:

get to point b from point a
collect all the blue coins
turn into a semi-truck and crush stuff

Engage your target!

Aside from these challenges, it seems like there are some semi-random encounters. For instance, I was leaving Faraway Oasis to the south, heading south-east when I saw two racers up ahead, one with the word TARGET over its head. I raced towards them, deploying my golden mushroom enough to catch up. One of them was throwing down question mark blocks feeding me green shells. After a few minutes of racing I closed the gap and fired off a green shell! It missed on the approach but bounced off the guardrail and came back into one of the racers! They were knocked out! I kept going, bobbing and weaving through a canyon until I was close enough to fire. Direct hit! The Charging Chuck I was tasked with eliminating was defeated and I was greeted with a message congratulating me. These little encounters are incredibly fun!

You can zoom in but the detail never changes

One thing I would love to see them improve would be the map - or the lack there-of. You have this big, open world, but there isn’t a very good map to look at with details. You can’t bring up a map and zoom in and inspect it. There is a mini-map when you’re cruising the world but it presents the world from an up high angle. Kind of strange! The tourism binoculars you find also shoot your p.o.v. up into the air which makes pinpointing what you’re looking at kind of difficult. My last point of criticism (for now, anyway!) is the lack of local multiplayer free-roam. I know you can do it online, but it would be excellent if Catrena and I could toot around the world together locally.

Characters & Costumes

We need to talk abou the costumes. Donkey Kong has only 1 alternate costume, but Shy Guy has 2. Toadette has 4 but Pauline has 2! She only has two costumes but her alternate costume has already caused a stir so maybe they didn’t want to overwhelm the internet. Some of Peach’s costumes are ripped right out of Odyssey but it appears Daisy’s costumes are all original? I’m complaining about this because the costume system is cool and I just want to see more of it, not because it’s anemic but because it could be so much fuller. The costume distribution system also feels like it was maybe intended to be something else? Grab a to-go bag outside of Yoshi’s Restaurant and you’ll be treated to a tasty looking meal (ranging from a candy bar or chips all the way to exotic roast meats - seriously the food is amazing and I want to do a post on it). Use the meal (just like a regular item) and your character could change costumes (and unlock it for later use). I like the costumes! But I don’t understand why we’d want to change costumes mid course. Especially if everyone doesn’t have the same amount - some of the playable enemy characters don’t have alternate costumes at all. It feels like there could have been something else planned here.

Items

If you were to give me a big open world where I can turn into a semi-truck or a UFO, I would assume there would be items with the same kind of boundless imagination! And I would be incredibly wrong! All of the standard MK items are here; bananas, green, red & blue shells, lightning. There are some new items - the gold coin shell which seeks the center of the course knocking out anyone in its way until finally it explodes into coins. Also the ice flower, the antithesis of the iconic fire flower. To me it feels uninspired. Mario Kart Double Dash is my favorite of the series, that game had some special items for each character - imagine if the outfit that you switch to in the middle of a race would have an impact on the kinds of items you could collect. It would offer some cohesion to the systems at play! But even without all of this, it’s a great game and the item usage can get extremely frantic. Classic Mario Kart!

What’s Next!?

So far we’ve been having a great time with it. We’ve still got characters and costumes to unlock, loads of P switch missions to complete, secret question mark blocks and medallions to find and online races to lose. We’ve mostly just focused on getting gold on the 100cc races and knock-out mode, which we’ve completed this evening! 150cc races are next! I’ll continue to update this as we play more!

Oh one last thing, there is a really kick-ass photo mode! Even though I’m a freak for photography I don’t find myself using photo modes often but something about this one has been great!

blog | Statement on the Occupation of L.A.

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:08:27 -0700

If you’ve been paying any attention to the news the last few days I’m sure you’ve seen the attacks on Los Angeles leveraged by the current executive branch of the United States Government. Between the illegal, unconstitutional raids on people whose documented status is in question or the LAPD being so overwhelmed that the National Guard, first, and then the US FUCKING MARINE CORPS have to be called in as reinforcements, its a full on right-wingers wet dream in the streets - and skies - thanks to these sweeping declarations. But how embarrassing must this be for the LAPD? 2.14 billion dollars a year budget and they couldn’t squash one small uprising who (successfully!) pushed back federal immigration agents? TWO POINT ONE FOUR BILLION DOLLARS wasn’t enough for them they needed REINFORCEMENTS from weekend warriors? The answer (yes) is even objectively funnier because even the national guard was no match for the few hundred protestors and their endless supply of robotic cars, so the Marine Corps were also requested to come in and point their weapons at reporters and commuters, to intimidate those standing up for the voiceless whose only crime is existing and going to work! Our intrepid, feckless mayor, not able to pin her mistakes on a gay woman, has decided to implement a curfew just to press the boot into necks of the dissidents while also taking a big, beefy lick. How much money will she take from social services next time to inflate the bloated, stinking carcas that is the LAPD?

The fact that these raids are taking place at graduation ceremonies, garment shops, restaurants and hotels is deplorable! People working are not criminals. People supporting their families are not illegal. It’s a nonsensical term only perpetuated by the heartless racists that occupy every youtube channel, X (twitter) thread and fucking podcast (when will science finally rid of podcasts?), deeming anyone they think do not deserve to stand upon stolen land illegitimate. And - right on queue - calls of looters and vandals have dominated the news cycle, because corporate property will always play second chair to human rights. Never is there a call to address the issues being protested to begin with. Never is there a statement starting with “We’ve heard your voices” but rather “we see your crimes.” Well we see your fucking crimes you goddamned criminals and I cannot imagine the people will step away from the streets, no matter how many sirens or helicopters or bullets or tear gas canisters or budget increases or lobotomized troops are thrown back in retaliation. Long live the resistance. Abolish ICE. Defund the LAPD. ACAB means our daunting troops - who in my lifetime have never provided me a single freedom but have shown me the horrors of a failed nation.

bleets | June 05, 2025

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:28:24 -0700

Happy Switch 2 Release day for all who celebrate. I’m currently waiting on my delivery from UPS and hope that it gets here so I have something to connect this Pro Controller to. Whitefish salad unrelated.

games | Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 22:00:32 -0700

Tonight I had a little time to myself so I decided to boot up the old switch! It’s been sitting kind of dormant recently, not only have I not been playing games too often, when I am, these days, I’m using the Steam Deck. I was browsing the e-shop when it dawned on me - The Onimusha 2 Remaster released! A game I’ve been interested in after seeing it in the February State of Play. So let’s dive in! (I’ve brought over my thoughts on Onimusha: Warlords from 2022 if curious).

First Hour

Immediately, after the opening cut-scenes you can feel the tonal shift in this game from the first. There are these cute dioramas that introduce the cast of characters that are about to be a major part of this game and they have a goofy air to them. Gone is the creepy mansion slowly unfolding before you like a paper map - now we’re being moved to specific areas. After seeing his village burned to the ground, Jubei is called to a cave and given the gift of absorbing the souls of slain demons, then sent off into the world to find 5 magical orbs. The first stop on this journey is a small mining town full of life, slapstick and whacky characters.

I think this is the biggest change, for me, you now have these funny guys that are hanging around towns and dungeons, sometimes jumping in to fight with you, other times they are around to trade items with. There is this whole mechanic of gift-giving that I’m still trying to figure out - it’s not quite like the Links Awakening trading quest, though someone gave me a piece of chalk and hoped I could turn it into a canteloupe so it feels like maybe we’re building up to something. Sometimes these allies will tell you specifically what they want (“Booze from around the world!” or “I came here to learn”) but other times its more vague (“I want to be entertained!”). I’m really trying to not look up a guide but I’m also nervous that you won’t be able to replace certain items if you trade them, I’m hitting a bit of friction there.

So far the combat has been pretty good, it seems quite simple compared to the first game but again I’m only about an hour in. I found a scroll in a puzzle box that gave me instructions on how to use the “true power” of one of my swords (R + back to forward + Y) so I’m assuming the combat is going to open up and breath. I also have two weapons already, certain weapons unlock specific magical gates so I expect to get more of those. The first boss, this weird spider guy, was a pretty good fight and he knocked me out once, but it was pretty fun. I had an ally with me and he was stunning the boss and then encouraging me to move in and go for the kill. I like the allies so far, it’s an interesting addition to this series.

My last observation is specifically lobbied towards the remaster. By default the aspect ratio is set to 16x9. I thought that it looked pretty good that way. The ratios were all correct and the environments looks nice filling my big TV. Then I got to the mining town and there was a statue you can look at it - its head was cut-off! I switched the aspect ratio and sure enough, turns out they are just zooming in on the 4:3 image and cutting off the top and bottom, as opposed to reformatting everything to fit 16:9 natively. I find that a bit lazy and I don’t like the idea that we’re missing out on anything so I’m going to leave it on 4:3.

Jun 2, 2025 / 9:03 pm

Okay I caved - I did a little research on the gift giving system. I was just too curious not too! To my credit, I read through the manual first to see if it gave me any more insight beyond what I already knew and it did not. Here’s as much as I learned before I turned away:

The gift system will let you raise your affinity with each of your allies.
By raising this affinity you can affect the story and unlock playable chapters for each of the allies.
The ending you get will be affected by whomever you have the highest affinity for.
There is no way to check your affinity, in-game.

WHEW! I didn’t look at any guides for what characters would like which gift, the game gives you some subtle clues and SO FAR I’ve been able to suss out who wants what based off their personalities. My plan moving forward is to go by gut, give gifts as I see fit, but allow myself to save scum a bit if things go horribly wrong. I’m not going to try to go for a specific ending, instead I’m going to let the chips fall where they may and see what happens! I’m loving the moving character portraits that happen when you give them something, too. It reminds me of the talking characters that jump right up to the front of the screen in those off-brand Link/Zelda CD-i games.

Jun 2, 2025 / 10:21 pm

I realize now they are using the mines as a way to help me get money. I’ve gone back in and out of the mines a few times now just to farm some gold and souls. The upgrades demand A LOT of souls in this game and I fear I’m not going to get my equipment upgraded too far. I had wandered into the wrong part of the town and accidentally triggered the next stage of the story, I wasn’t quite done buying stuff from the store, I still had a parrot and some engagement rings left but! I’m not going back. No no no we must continue on!

Jun 3, 2025 / 4:41 pm

This area I’m in is like the Lost Wood of Onimusha. There are these straight-aways and you have to whack this fat, poison mosquito a few times for it to pop and infest the area with its hallucinogenic gasses, then - and only then! - the correct path is revealed. Once I got through those corridors I was treated with a cut-scene and a new potential foe, this giant pig woman that looks like the bride of Ganon from the first Legend of Zelda game. It turns out she’s not who I’ll be fighting here, instead I’m going to fight the spider-body guy from the mines and she’ll attack later. There’s lots of banter in this game - the characters love chatting and razzing one another.

One of my problems with a game like this is its ability to get you locked into a section where your choices are:

Go forth, boss bottle and die
Go back for supplies across a gauntlet of guys and die

That was what I was struggling with last night, the boss was kicking my ass so I decided to try my hand with the gauntlet of guys in the forbidden woods. After a few rounds of fighting, I upgraded some equipment, got my health full and moved on with my one heal. That was enough to refocus me and slay the weird spider legged boss!

Jun 3, 2025 / 11:06 pm

Tonight I made some good progress! I fought my way through the pig ladies layer, found a mechanical dolphin and soared through the skies and through the ocean like frickin’ Poseidon. I lost a sword fight on the beach but was rescued (again) by Oyu. This turned into a section that was playable by Oyu! I liked her sword and shield mechanics, though it feels like they made her slightly over powered. I like these small sections where you have to puzzle your way through but they aren’t super complicated - it actually makes bite sized game sessions really accessible. Once I was finished with Oyu and found the magical flute that will apparently make fighting demons easier, I regained control of Jubei and headed back into the castle. I revised a few areas and grabbed some collectibles - these were areas I found with Oyu but lacked the tools to access, it’s a fun way to contain the backtracking of a bigger game like Resident Evil or Castlevania.

The next major section I got to was BACK at the castle from the first area, or rather a tower connected to the grounds. When I got to the bottom of that tower a cutscene triggered and I got to play as Ekei! His section was pretty involved. I needed to navigate around a bridge, through the old mansion (where I rescued some collectibles), in a boat and through another section of the boat house. His combat is good, I liked that you get to use the same magic freezing attacks that Ekei uses when helping you in combat. Hes a well rounded fighter but cannot take more than a couple of powerful hits. I finished off the night back at the door Jubei was locked in and transferred over control. I guess that means my affinity with Ekei is pretty high!

Jun 10, 2025 / 7:20 pm

I’ve returned! Life has been a bit crazy since the last time I posted an updated on Onimusha 2, most of which was good despite the ongoing unrest and occupation of Los Angeles. I haven’t fully abandoned this game since the Switch 2 has released, but it had taken a back seat to me sinking my fangs into Mario Kart World. Playing this on the Switch 2, however has been a real treat.

After that I moved through the rest of that castle, crashed a spaceship (airplane?) on the top of a mansion and started my march towards the finale. Guess who showed back up again to try and halt my progress? If you guessed a 4-legged behemoth whom I fought twice before, you’d be right! Only this time he’s not coming back.

“I’m going to cut right to the chase, here” he says after two paragraphs. I got through this little area and made a run on Nobunaga! I had two magic refills and two health refills, as well as a talisman (zelda fairy). I had also leveled up all of my weapons and a few of my armor pieces. “No problem” I said. Nobunaga replied “Problem.”

I think I’m stuck here. I cannot make my way back to a previous area to get more supplies or to gather some things that I’ve missed. There are necklaces that you can get that will help you regenerate magic and health and I know I missed a bunch of health and magic augments. Some of this stuff comes from the gift giving game, some of it comes from the phantom realms, these gauntlets you need to traverse, level by level. I know all of this because I looked it up after failing to beat Nobunaga 5, maybe 10, times. It is a tough fight! He’s got multiple forms, leverages a lot of magic attacks and flies around the room. I need stuff! I need more health and heals, more magic and refills, I need those necklaces! So I’m considering restarting the game. There’s no new game plus or anything so if I did want to see more of the relationship stuff and any secrets, now is as good a time as ever. I haven’t gone back through my saves yet to see if I have one that will take me back just far enough so I don’t have to restart, but that may also be an option.

But for now, I’m going to put this on hold. I’m going back to Yakuza 4 to finish that off. I’ll update this again when I decide what I’m going to do!

One day we'll return... one day.

blog | Hugo and CSV Data: CSV to Links

Thu, 29 May 2025 10:25:38 -0700

This started off as a quick message in discord and then I realized I was about to write way more than I wanted, so it became a blogpost.

I did some more work on the site last night, fixing a few things here and there while also adding in a /blogroll section. I wanted the blogroll to be generated from a data file - my idea being to use to my database program, ninox¹, to build a form that I could then use to enter in the link data. From Ninox - I can export it as a CSV. And i had started this path KNOWING that hugo can parse CSV information, there were a few things that I did not know;

CSV files are NOT data files in the same way a TOML/YAML/JSON file are. Meaning you can not throw them in the data folder and walk away. Hugo will yell at you.
CSV files are mostly used to generate a table because, unlike those formats previously listed, you don’t have proper key/value pairs. Hell, a CSV file doesn’t even need a header row. It can just be a list of stuff separated by some kind of punction, often (as the namesake implies) a comma.

I started to think about using a CSV file and a hugo content adapter to actually create the index page and subsequent link list entries for me, but the more I read the documentation and reviewed the processes (and checked out the most excellent sample site built using that method) I found it to be overkill. What I wanted was a nice looking list of links with space for me to talk about them. I started to write a shortcode based off the example on the transform.Unmarshal documentation page. This is where I ran into the problem with CSV’s and the way they organize information.

I tried a bunch of methods, but the end result I wanted was to get the data into a position where I could range through the map and call each piece of information by it’s appropriate header information. For example, this is how a csv is formatted;

id,date,link,linkname,description
1,2025-05-29,https://cyberbuffalo.party,"this is a cool website with cool stuff on it and you should all bookmark it and visit it everyday"

and this is how it needs to look;

id:1;
link:https//cyberbuffalo.party

this is kind of oversimplifying things and that’s because I don’t have a complete and full grasp of data handling, marshaling, unmarshaling, etc. Inside my shortcode, I cheated a bit and built a partial that our lord and savior of the hugo forums, jmooring, casually whipped up in response to someone else who was struggling with a similar problem of data handling.

csv-to-map.html

{{ $headerRow := index . 0 }}
{{ $s := slice }}
{{ range . | after 1 }}
  {{ $m := dict }}
  {{ range $k, $v := . }}
    {{ $m = merge $m (dict (index $headerRow $k) $v) }}
  {{ end }}
  {{ $s = $s | append $m }}
{{ end }}
{{ return $s }}

Inside of my shortcode, where this partial is called from, we’re doing something interesting. When you first define a variable you can define it as a collection: {{ $data := dict }} This is standard protocol for a lot of reasons, one of them being if you define a new variable inside of a statement it can be lost because it becomes part of that context. Define it first and then you have access to it without worry. Later, after I’ve imported the data file and everything, I redefine that $data variable by passing it into that partial!

{{ $data = partial "csv-to-map.html" . }}

that’s some slick ass shit and maybe the easiest way to maneuver what I was trying to do. Another useful function I employed while working through this was {{ debug.Dump ARG }}. Debug spits up a printout of whatever you want. This was a tip from good old Rappy. I find it incredibly useful to help you visualize what your context is, aka the dot. It also helped me to organize the $data map.

One last thing here before I wrap up, I have footnotes now! I hadn’t really seen a need for them until that comment up above about Ninox. I see the light!

Have I talked about Ninox on this website yet? It’s a database program that I found last year after having some downtown from work and needing a project to keep me busy at night. I used it to build a giant database of all the photoshoot/commercial jobs I’ve worked on all the way back to 2011! It was a lot of work but it taught me a lot and I think it ultimately gave me the motivation (and confidence!) to really work on this website. ↩︎

bleets | May 25, 2025

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:01:02 -0700

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is a book that I’ve had on my shelf since picking it up from a thrift store around 15 years ago. I saw the movie years ago, and I only remembered two things: Uma Thurman and big thumbs. I’m happy I finally made time to read this - alongside of me Catrena listened to the audio book - and when we finished, we watched the movie. I’ve never read a book that broke the fourth wall quite in the same way as Cowgirls, author Robbins really knows how to walk around a point, bringing in any possible topic as circumstance, but he does it with such wonderfully flowery run-on sentences that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s talking about. As a writer, his confidence to ramble on about a topic is legendary, and his long-form metaphors unrivaled. This book has some dated language and talks about whooping cranes too much, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. To spend anytime with the legendary hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw is worth any toll the road has to offer. Having finished this book, its apparent before we took up together she slowly extended her big beautiful digits at us and we did what anyone would do, we slowed down and hitched her a ride.

bleets | May 24, 2025

Sat, 24 May 2025 17:36:59 -0700

I started a list in apple notes today, 2025 Things Read and I felt silly because I could be doing this on the website. I’m not looking to write long-form book reviews, but I could use a section to put some thoughts out here and there. For instance I finished Even Cowgirls Get The Blues today then Catrena and I watched the movie (which I loved). I could use a space to pen out a few quick thoughts. Maybe that’s what this is for, my bleets.

I could throw them up and say “Book!” and make them part of a series and then they would look special in the feed, and get collected into a series. Hmm…

bleets | May 24, 2025

Sat, 24 May 2025 09:22:35 -0700

Stickers came in from slapco! I’m excited to be able to hand these out to other photographers or video game nerds or people who hate the corporate internet.

blog | Thoughts about the Fuji X-Half

Thu, 22 May 2025 16:41:47 -0700

My Fuji X Journey

I went on youtube today for some reason - I find myself doing anything I can to avoid that website because I find the ecosystem it has created is, in large part, some of what is very wrong with the internet at large. I can’t even remember why I was there but in the recommended tab I saw a bunch of preview videos for something called the Fuji X-Half… apparently I am out of the loop - I need to keep up on Fuji news more often. Somewhere around 2015 I sold my Canon 6D, a camera I very much enjoyed - the files were gorgeous - and bought a Fuji XE2 and a Fuji X-Pro 1. I really coveted those two cameras and as much as I liked the 6D, I never took the full kit out of the house. I wanted something that was portable and the money from trading out of the Canon meant I could try two. Eventually the XE2, along with the beautiful 35mm f1.2 lens, were stolen out of the center console of my truck. Literally, I swear, the only time I had ever left it in there - a mistake I would never make again - but it only takes once and it was gone. I didn’t like the X-Pro 1 as much as I hoped so I sold that and some accessories, but kept the 27mm f2.8, and shopped around. Eventually, I ended up with a very well used, cheap to procure XT-1 off facebook marketplace (god, this was so long ago I haven’t had a facebook in years) and the rest is history - the XT line has been my cameras of choice ever since (currently still using the XT-3 for any of our studio work and some on-location stuff).

Official glamour shot of the Fuji X-Half

But I’m a film shooter, as you may know, and I love playing with cameras and film, so the idea that Fuji was possibly making a half-frame camera was VERY interesting to me. I watched the review from PetaPixel which shed more light on the offering. No, unfortunately, it wasn’t a new aperture priority fixed-lens half-frame 35mm but instead its a weird experiment, a small pocketable camera that takes portait oriented photos and has a bizarre film camera simulation mode which, I have to admit, really triggered the part of my primitive brain that collects and uses cameras. But as I was watching this, I realized that another part of my brain was being triggered, and it was the part that is still desperately in love with another camera that I had along the way, the Fuji X-10.

Remember earlier when I said I hated taking the Canon 6D out of the house? I wasn’t joking, it was big, I had some big fat lenses for it (a macro lens that was such a great portrait shooter) and it was by and far the most expensive thing I owned - I was scared! I didn’t want to lose it or break it (or leave it in my glovebox like a fucking idiot). So I wanted a pocket shooter. I was traveling a bit for work and wanted something better than my phone or a point and shoot but didn’t want it cost a lot. What I really wanted was the Fuji X100 but I couldn’t afford it. What I could afford, it turns out, was an Amazon open box Fuji X-10.

Loveletter to the X-10

Hello, past us!

Think of the X10 like a baby X100 that hasn’t grown up yet. It was a lovely camera that felt great in the hand and had all the controls a pocketable camera with retro styling could offer. The optical viewfinder was big and bright and it compensated for the optical zoom on on the front of the unit - you zoom the lens, the viewfinder was coupled and moved with it! It had a variable aperture which usually means something like f4.5 to 8.7 but this camera? f2.0 - f2.8. The lens was pretty sharp wide open but I found the sweet spot was around 4/4.5. One other thing I liked about it was being able to zoom the camera while doing longer exposures. It lent itself to some fun experimentation. It also had a nice big exposure compensation wheel and program wheel sitting on the top of the camera. Easy to get to, easy to use.

On the front of the camera was a toggle to switch between two autofocus modes and manual focus. The manual focus was done by a ring around the lens, and it’s by wire, and it was maybe my least favorite feature. I liked that they tried, but I found it slow and unresponsive. But again, nice that it was there because it let you dial things in, especially shooting close. And because of the smaller sensor, the focus distance - much like the X-Half - allows you to get PRETTY close.

For me, there was nothing better than setting this to one of the great black and white film simulations, setting the crop to 1:1 and throwing it in my bag. Using it in aperture priority with the screen turned off was the best. It had the feeling of shooting with a tiny rangefinder and the included leaf shutter made sure it was quiet and incognito.

At night you could get away with some slow exposures if you were steady, the 2/3 inch sensor was small so you could handhold some shots, but the included built-in flash had just enough of a kiss that you could take some nice black and white portraits.

Unfortunately for me, my devil-may-care attitude was its downfall. The camera turned on with a flick of the zoom lens and mine flat out broke. I opened it up and attempted to fix it but it never worked again. The camera was discontinued pretty fast and replaced the X-20 and eventually the X-30, neither of which I owned but never wanted to. Looking at the prices of these on the used market I wish I had bought another one back then, because they demand a stupid price 10 or so years later. One day I’ll find a pocketable digital camera that will scratch the same itch.

Enter the X-Half

I’m looking at the X-Half almost as a spiritual successor to the X10, though the leaf shutter seems to be the only feature they share. The previews I watched all talked about the film-camera simulation mode as a way to slow down, focus on shooting, getting excited to see their film develop. Putting the X10’s SD card into my computer and reviewing the photos was similar. From what I can tell, the X-Frame is a less serious of a camera than the X10; a fixed lens as opposed to zoom, an LED flash instead of a traditional xenon (why put in a leaf shutter if you can’t high-speed sync a flash?), small led screen and few physical controls (most is done through the touch screen). I appreciate the simplicity approach, but in searching for that simplicity they fell into the trap of making a touch-screen do too much, and that’s never simple.

Final thoughts

I almost pre-ordered the X-Half. But I slowed down and finished watching the petapixel review. My excitement slowly subsided but I’m still intrigued. Today, however, due to the forces that seek to make imports into the US as expensive as possible - for their own gain, mind you - I think the camera is too expensive. B&H has it listed for 849. That’s a lot of money for what is being described to me as something that lets you experience the joy and fun of photography. Don’t I already experience that? It’s also been described as light and less than premium feeling, that’s something I wouldn’t expect from a camera that will cost 1000$ after sales tax. I should probably just fork over the dough and finally by a new X100 - whichever is the newest model, because I think its only twice the price but 10 times the camera. After all you get the film simulation modes, the excellent prime lens, the APS-C sized sensor. But… there isn’t a film winder… hmmm…? I’m still intrigued, but I’m going to wait to see more, or maybe see a price drop.

bleets | May 15, 2025

Thu, 15 May 2025 22:18:39 -0700

I started to tweak the css for the image gallery plug-ins I made and i’m starting to realize why people use pre-written libraries for this. There is a seemingly infinite amount of scenarios you need to take into account. I’m following the “you can’t please everyone” philosophy and trying to keep things tidy without going crazy. I haven’t poked at this since I got up and running and in that time (what 2 months, maybe?) I feel I’ve learned enough that going back to this CSS and can quickly see the mistakes that were made.

bleets | May 13, 2025

Tue, 13 May 2025 16:07:56 -0700

I wanted to make some stickers or something for the website and I think I just made the best thing ever.

bleets | May 11, 2025

Sun, 11 May 2025 15:32:36 -0700

So I wrote that blog post the other day all about the next steps for the site, a to-do list for my next steps and I go ahead and do something completely different. Say hello to the updated /galleries. Something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but hadn’t gotten around to, I’ve changed the way the gallery list looks, making it more about the photography, and giving it a unique look. Check it out!

bleets | May 08, 2025

Thu, 08 May 2025 14:29:06 -0700

Some site updates coming out today. RSS feed is live! Give it a shot, all you weary netizens, subscribe to me. I’ve added a statement on AI usage, a temporary blog-roll page which I’m going to tinker with, all while I’m still chugging away at Yakuza, planning a wedding and watching the world burn.

blog | Site Maintenance and Changes

Thu, 08 May 2025 13:16:41 -0700

Much To-Do about Everything

Over the last few days I’ve focused my attention back to the website after a bit of a hiatus. Last night I decided to write a much-needed and stupid statement on AI usage and this website (spoiler alert - no AI ever) along with adding a slash page for blogroll. I also bit the bullet and added a link to the RSS feed. I was worried the feed wouldn’t work or looked bad, but I got the A-OKAY from my friend gracie_cat that everything looks good. So WOO! RSS feed is launched!

The one thing that I DO want to fix/add/change on the RSS feed is the ability to flag updated articles (especially a games thread) as UPDATED so they pop up at the top of the feed. I think I can do this with lastmod but I need to research how RSS feeds work a little more.

In the games section I want to add a Last Updated: tab to the header image, which seems trivial I just need to do it. Actually I found this article on LoopedLine talking about doing this the right way, using a gt the greater than operator.

For the blog roll page, I have a style and design in mind and I think the best way (the simple way) would be to serve the data from a data file. I have this dream that maybe I cna use Ninox to organize and add all the links to a new database and then export that database as an CSV, I’m going to investigate.

| Blogroll

Wed, 07 May 2025 23:55:52 -0700

This is a work in progress! I’ve been making some changes to the site and decided I’ve put this off long enough!

| AI Content Policy

Wed, 07 May 2025 20:49:31 -0700

CyberBuffalo and Generative AI

I have been reluctant to write one of these thinking that the words I’ve written, analogue photos I’ve taken and posted and graphics created in Affinity would be enough of a statement - I’m not exactly subtle about my distain for generative AI, LLMs, ChatBots and the like. But now having seen The Onion come under fire for a well-done photoshop job - yes that Onion - I figure it’s time to actually put a hard line in the sand and stand up and say

I have not used nor will I use generative AI on this website, in my personal life or for my profession, in any capacity at all, in the past nor will I in the future. Not for writing, not for image creation, not even for code.

I find the entire affair completely unnecessary. Really? You need your phone to summarize a text message for you? What are you fucking stupid that you cannot read what is probably ALREADY A VERY SHORT MESSAGE? You need a summary of that? You cannot write your own grocery list? Perhaps you could do a web-search for “starter grocery lists” and see what real human beings WHO NEED TO EAT have said on the matter. There is an old phrase that I’ve always liked, generally used when talking about creating something that people will use - find a need and fill it. Generative AI fills no need. Much like late-night, made for TV inventions, it’s a repackage of so many other things, creates an imaginary problem, and does a piss-poor job of solving it. I saw a social post the other day that said “You don’t need chatGPT I am perfectly capable of drinking a bottle of water and lying to you.” and I (along with 15 thousand others) felt that. There’s also this classic:

lol

If you need a reason, if somehow you’ve made it to May of 2025 and still were sitting on the fence about generative AI let me say this: it’s built upon the backs of everything that came before it, without consent, without acknowledgment and without attribution. Billions of dollars worth of fake valuation is being handed to a handful of shucksters while they scrape the internet, picking apart the rotting bones of the free-web despite the bandwidth or financial pain they may inflict, without regard for the resources they waste, for the fresh water they hoard and spoil. And again - all for nothing. So don’t use it. Not even for a joke! It’s a destructive force hellbent on creating one thing and one thing only - capital for a ruling class. There is no purpose other than to put hardworking people out of a job. It attacks the very heart of humanity - creation! Don’t let them take away the flavor of life, reject generative AI in your own work! AI IS THE TOOL OF THE ENEMY.

blog | Buff Certification

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:22:55 -0700

Welcome to May!

April went by like a dragonfly out of the corner of my eye. Lots of family stuff, lots of work, all of which is good because my life has been lacking both, this year. I glanced at my blog and realized the last thing I published there was my not-review on Travels with Charley, a book I very much enjoyed. I have started a third book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues but I’ve taken a break - Catrena is going to get the audio book, and I’ve been catching up on some comics. It’s not exactly non-fiction but I’ve had that book on my shelf for years (yes, I had started it in the past and yes, I am already past where I was back then).

I’ve also come back to the blog because of a new feature I’ve added to the games section, Buff Certification. This is a silly label I’m adding to games that I feel are the perfect embodiments of the games I love. They are not going to be the best games ever made, they might have rough edges, they may even be controversial, but they are games that fit within me, click perfectly into my personality, have influence over my thoughts. We all have those tastes, I think as I get older I’m getting better at recognizing mine. When we’re younger (when I was younger) we have more to prove - some of us anyways - we hold up pretentions so that people will think about us one way or another, we may not want to admit that the pop-corn flick made for mass consumption is actually wonderful and we love it. The older you get, the less you care about other peoples’ opinions - well for me anyways. So as a fun exercise I decided I wanted to add this classification to the games section, and in order to do that I need a catchy graphic.

Where to Start?

Right away I knew I wanted this to be some kind of certification. I almost called it CERTIFIED DANK… but decided against it for obvious reasons. BUFF CERTIFIED was actually the second name I came up with and it just stuck. It’s great! Weird, short, concise - love it. I wanted the graphic to feel like a digital version of a USDA meat grade, you know like GRADE A BEEF, because people eat buffalo, get it? What is the cyber version of that? I started to do some picture research and the only thing I came up with was this GOG Preserved Game logo. It’s the only example of a cyber brand I saw that I thought was at all interesting. I played around with it for a little while - and didn’t get very far because it just felt a) derivitive and b) not very interesting - I didn’t even add any color to it before I abandoned the idea.

Cool, but what is it?

The next avenue I took was to just play with fonts and color. If I could come up with a combination I liked maybe the idea of the logo would come. When making one of the default blog images I found this cool pixelated gradient that felt very much in line with the rest of the direction of the graphics. I decided to use this as a background and then played with some fonts on top of that. I liked where this was going, but the aspect ratio felt off, and it wasn’t referential. I wanted it to be some kind of cyber brand, even though I didn’t know what that was.

Enter - Outside Influence

When I’m working at my desk I have a habit of watching movies at the same time. Fifty percent of the time my choice will provide the right amount of background noise that I will be able to concentrate and get through whatever task I have in front of me. The rest of the time is split, 25% of the time I shut the movie off because its distractingly bad and the final 25% I slowly move my way to the couch and get completely sucked in. It’s because of this habit that I stumbled onto what would be the final design directive for this project, and it came from a Will Smith movie called “Enemy of the State”, an insane movie that features Jack Black, Seth Green, Jamie Kennedy and Jake Busey as an elite NSA hacking team that is chasing down Jason Lee who is also a hacker. Knowing that the pursuit is underway - he feels the heat! - the only thing left for him to do is use his floppy drive to copy a video to PCMCIA card and then store that card in the back of an NEC TurboExpress (I know I know).

Why am I telling you this? Well, as Jake Busey attempted to bust into the apartment they quickly panned around the room which was well decorated, lots of cool 90s tech, and there on the front of one of one of the computer towers, shining like a beacon of hope and inspiration, was a processor badge! Or at least I thought it was, i went back and couldn’t find it again, maybe I was just reminded that they exist but A PROCESSOR BADGE! The little stickers that go on the front of your beige tower that tells the entire world you assuredly have a pentium processor inside!! If there were ever a cyber-brand for digital cowboys THIS! WAS! IT! Glance upon the glory, take them in and be reminded!

What’s Inside?

This is the one!

Looking closer through all of these, one of them stood out as something that I could gain inspiration from. It wasn’t necessarily my favorite -the 286 badges are particularly well crafted, though I cannot verify their authenticity - but a simple, modern looking Pentium sticker was the one. It was simple and just glancing upon it I could easily translate it into my own design language, using the pixelated background and the fonts I liked. The actual design came together pretty fast, I just needed to tweak the colors, apply the fonts and then… the circle… what am I going to do for the circle? The Intel branding has had that perfect little swooshing circle around it for decades, but that’s not what I wanted, that’s not the cyber buffalo way!

The first iteration

I went through a few iterations of this, the first was a non-pixelated circle that I bisected with the word BUFF and I left it at that for about 24 hours. I kept thinking about it, how it didn’t fit in. It looked too … normal. I continued to play around with circles and then I looked through some stock graphics I had downloaded, looking for something pixelated that could spark inspo. I found a sheet of graphics that were circles and arrows, all done with square pixels. None of the circles worked, so I copied one of the partials, made it whole, applied it to the graphic and started to chip away at the squares. I tweaked this so it wasn’t even and had more of that swoosh effect. Some time with this and I was finally happy. Introducing you to the BUFF CERTIFIED badge. It’s going to make a great sticker.

BUFF CERTIFIED, BABY!

Thanks for walking back through that process with me. It was fun to come up with. This was all because I wanted to say The Bouncer was sick as hell and worth more than a sarcastic youtube video. It’s a way for me to say “Take another glance at this game, it has something going for it you aren’t going to find somewhere else, at least not exactly.” You can even browse through all the games with this classification thanks to the Hugo taxonomy series.

Attributions

Red and Black Pixelated Gradient

Kemco Pixel Font

Doto Font

games | Yakuza 4

Sat, 03 May 2025 12:21:15 -0700

At the beginning of 2023 I was going through some medical stuff that kept me inside much more than usual. One of the comforts I found that kept me sane was the grimey, intriguing, underground world of Yakuza 0. I loved that game, the dual character format, the hostess club, minigames and side stories. It’s an excellent game, and I think Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios have done an excellent job at practically brute-forcing their way into the average gamers’ life in the west. Since 2023, I’ve played up through Yakuza 3 and today, another lazy Saturday where the skies are grey and the temperature doesn’t know it should be well into hot, I’m starting Yakuza 4.

I’ve never played a game series that was so consistent with its style and locale like the Yakuza series is. If I think about it hard enough I would probably come to the conclusion The Legend of Zelda is the series I’ve played the most of and they are mostly different in their locales, gimmicks and characters. Yakuza - most likely my second most played - generally drops you right into the thick of Kamurocho, at least half the time, and Y4 is no different - it’s always a joy, I love coming back here. I’m excited to see what’s changed, what’s the same, what games and prizes are at the arcade and if my favorite restaurant is still in business.

Hanging out.

This time, however, we’re introduced to a new playable character, Shun Akiyama. My first response would be to hate this man - we all fear and hate the unknown, right? But his lackadaisical attitude towards working, his general lazy man vibe, pushed the needle towards intrigued. Your boy loves a lazy guy who also gets the job done and, while I love Kiryu (I already miss him), I’m going to see how things shake out with Akiyama before I start to get fussy about change.

May 3, 2025 / 12:38 pm

Chapter 1 is complete and MAN! This game was a really knows how to hook a guy in. The story so far is pretty interesting, a loan officer with a heart of gold, looking to help bolster the protegé of a small-time Yakuza family. Some rowdy guests at a hostess club from a rival family, and a murder. This first chapter could be used as a textbook example of how to bring people into a new story with new characters for a well established franchise. One thing I’ve noticed about Y4, coming from Y3 - the music is so much better. There have only been a few composed pieces so far but it was enough that I paid attention.

May 3, 2025 / 1:04 pm

OH MY GOD Akiyama was a homeless man outside of the Millenium Tower the day it exploded?? Is this how he got the cash to finance his loan business? Part of me thought Kiryu was going to be his mysterious benefactor - this is also a cool throwback. I’m looking forward to his story unfolding.

I’m well into Chapter 3 now and I’ve played quite a few mini-games. I’m really interested in this arcade game, Boxcelios 2. I have a vague memory of stumbling around Boxcelios 1 in one of the previous game; this time around I decided to really give it a shot. It’s pretty weird! I got to level 40 which felt like a win but wasn’t even in the top 20 on the leaderboard. The star of the show, at least to where I am right now… is table tennis.

I don’t know if table tennis was in the previous games, I don’t remember every playing it but it’s great. You have to play tennis, but you also have to oggle the goods of your female opponent. It’s kind of like that dating mini game in Killer is Dead where you need to oggle the ladies enough to fill up a meter in order to give them a present and impress them enough to bed them. Here it’s just about getting your heat up high enough to spike the ball hard enough that they fall into compromising positions. It’s perfect.

May 4, 2025 / 8:59 am

I’m well into chapter 3 and I’m reminded of what I didn’t like about Yakuza 3, though I’m not saying this is present here - at least so far. In Y3 the side-stories were bland and uninteresting, and fairly one-note - the ones that I did, which was a considerable amount. I really pushed myself to get them done and towards the end I pushed myself over the finishing line. Here, in Y4, the side-stories with Akiyama have been pretty robust, giving you more of his backstory, even just candidly and without the drama the series can lean on. The side characters are pretty interesting, including the man who bankrupted his business because he was being an idiot, or the man that needed the money to stay afloat and decided to go into money lending - how do you think that ended for him?

Speaking of characters, Hana is a treat. A full departure from the women in the series thus far. Though she is a bit of a cartoon character at times, I like that she’s tough and outspoken while wrapped in a cherubesque package. Hell, she killed a man for us (or possibly just maimed him for life)!

Oh how have I not talked about this - rooftops and undergrounds?? What is this, Tears of the Kingdom? We’ve had rooftops in the city before, just in cutscenes and as a few one-off set pieces for boss fights. But here they are fully traversable and can hold characters and secrets. This is a good addition. Earlier today I was traipsing around and I found a camper van up on the roof and inside was a guy selling me weapons.

May 5, 2025 / 8:50 am

Today we woke up earlier than usual and since I have the steamdeck hooked up to the TV in the bedroom I was able to get right into Kamurocho. It looks like I have cleared all of Akiyama’s side stories, the last of which was like the trading game from Wind Waker. I turned one cigarette into a watch worth almost 1 million yen! Not too shabby work, considering it’s not even 9am. I also went on a date with Miki to help her regain her confidence as a hostess - both of these were direct follow-ups to side-stories I had done in the previous chapters. I’m really enjoying the way these tie directly into the main characters’ life and feel more like an extension of the main plot than, say, Kiryu helping a 16 year old girl beat up the pervert that stole her underwear. While I like the wackiness of the previous titles, I like the grounded nature of the story so far. Don’t get me wrong, this game is not taking itself too serious, it still feels like a Yakuza game.

May 5, 2025 / 11:11 pm

Tonight after dinner Akiyama and I came back to his office to find the place trashed. On the floor in the middle of the room was poor Hana-Chan I was besides myself! A flashback provided us with the who and after questioning some bystanders on the street we found our perpetrators. In true Yakuza fashion, before we went underway with our search they managed to cram in a new character and mechanic. My favorite part of Yakuza 3 has made a return, the photography/QTE mini-game: Revelations - AKA the Perfect Shot! This is the devs getting to shoehorn in the weirdest situations they can think up under the guise of a photography game all while teaching you more heat actions and moves. It’s brilliant. Tonight’s subjects were a man cloaked in underwear trying to flee a panty-stealing scene, a detective wearing a skirt whos perp gets more than a glimpse after a fateful gust of wind, and a Hong Kong style Kung-Fu fight between a jilted Wife and her side-stepping husband.

What a shot!

After my photography lesson, I tracked down the entrance to the Yakuza’s hideout that knocked out Hana-Chan and kidnapped Kido. A hallmark of the series - you find some opposing group kidnaps one of your friends and then its a mad dash through a gauntlet of guys, breaking through doors and walls as you storm into their hideout. This time the setting wasn’t just some tasteless Yakuza hideout, it was the well decorated basement of the Millennium Tower. This chase culminated with the enforcer busting into an office with a freakin’ chainsaw like that guy in Resident Evil 4. It was a thrilling chase!

I AM LEATHERFACE!

Something I’m not enjoying is the Club Elise hostess game - complete nonsense. You need to take a girl, use ESP to suss out what the customers are going to want them to be, use limited funds to dress them up to change their stats, which you can only check once, then you send them on their way! You then have 3 seconds to survey the floor to find out what people want via random pop-up speech bubbles. Rinse and repeat. It’s frustrating because the game clearly knows what it wants - and it clearly has one correct way - but its intentionally obtuse. This also comes after the greatest hostess club mini game of all time (Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 2 both feature this mode). I’m not looking forward to interacting with this more.

HOLY SHIT The Mad Dog of Shimano comes in at the end and drops some deep lore in our laps. I’ve been holding back my predictions because I’m terrible with names, but I had been postulating she has something to do with Haruka’s mother from Yakuza 1!

May 6, 2025 / 11:19 pm

I normally do not enjoy games that have you switching characters between chapters. I can get attached to my little avatars. I also find it frustrating in games where you invest resources into growing those characters - unlocking moves stats what-have-yous - and then those get sidelined while you go off on a side adventure with some interstitial. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black was an exception, so is NieR Automata and Bayonetta 3 (though that one just sort of sneaks by). Maybe I’m no longer adverse to this because when Part 2 of Y4 opens with a new character, Saejima, I was not immediately put out. I love the deep lore of this backstory (especially after getting a good reminder from Rappy), I like the setting, I don’t love the fighting style. I also didn’t love the weird, sexually charged moment between Haruka and this con, nor did I like the fact that Kiryu saw it happen and did not intervene. It was a weird moment and I found it completely unnecessary. Now that Saejima and I are back in Kamurocho, I’m enjoying seeing how the story is playing out - going after Majima and the Florist - where it’s playing out - in the tunnels and rooftops - and who its revolving around - the unhoused population. The side-stories I’ve used have been really great so far as well, much like in the first section they are more complimentary to the main plot than they are whacky to be whacky. I’m excited to see how this plays out.

May 8, 2025 / 10:47 pm

I finished part 2! But not because I wanted to, I still had a fair amount of stuff left to do. There was one substory plot line that I really wanted to see through so I’m hoping I’ll be able to jump around like previous games to clean up the loose ends. I haven’t really gelled with Saejima’s fighting style as of yet. I find he’s always looking the wrong direction - he misses (he as in me) attacks all the time. I’m not adverse to slow, methodical characters, but that’s not how I would describe him. He’s slow but chaotic. And for some reason EVERYONE wants to grapple him all the time I’m just sick of it! He has a very weak bench of heat actions, some of them have impossibly small windows especially when you are fighting someone like Majima. My last complaint; his heat takes forever to fill, at least 2-3 perfect combos, and he loses it twice as fast! All those grapplers sap your heat like hummingbirds drinking nectar. The worst part is I’m hardly losing health, just getting knocked down and tossed around.

I also hope I’m going to be able to go back and continue the dojo - I’ve only gotten my student to complete one fight so far. That little nerd needs my guidance. Please, let me go back!

May 14, 2025 / 6:59 pm

I’ve been a bit busier than I’d like but I’ve still been chipping away at Y4, but I haven’t really had too much to say. Not much, that is… until I met Masayoshi Tanimura.

He’s a cop - he’s a dirty cop - he’s a dirty cop covering for possible human traffickers - he’s a dirty cop covering for possible human traffickers by shaking them down for money and using that money to smuggle falsely deported people back into the country. I love the way his story is unfolding and, like the last few characters, I’m impressed by how urbane he is; he knows the streets, he understands nuance, he flirts. And he’s standing up for those that should not be seen, he’s great.

Tanimura also has this radio mechanic that’s just addicting. You’ll be walking around and an APB pops up giving you a who and a what and it’s up to you track em down. Sometimes these go quick and end in the standard Yakuza way of just beating the absolute shit out of someone, but some of them have a pretty involved story, offer choices, and jam in the new-and-improved chase mechanic which finally feels at home in the series.

A cry for Help

I’m having a crisis - I really want to see this story through and I feel guilty that I’m not investing 8000 hours into dating hostesses, playing ping-pong and losing at mah-jong. It finally dawned on me today what the Yakuza series is all about - it’s a child’s birthday party. There were clowns and cowboys and pin the tail on the donkey and cake and hot dogs and a magician and his mom and dad got into a fight and tried to hide it but i totally saw it - it’s everything a growing boy could ask for wrapped up in a game. Just today I played pool and had a cocktail, then I chased down a purse snatcher and broke up a ring of car thieves. Then I went and sang karaoke. Sometimes this game offers you too much to do and right now, I just want to see my new and old friends Akiyama and Kiryu. I don’t know if I will come in number one at the mah-jong tournament (I’m currently sitting square at 26th after like 2 hours of draws), I’m not sure if I’m ever going to go back and train those dorky kids to win tournaments and I certainly am unsure if Club Elise will ever become the best hostess spot in Kamurocho. But I know I’m going to beat the tar out of anyone who stands in my way, whether I intend to do these things or not.

May 18, 2025 / 9:11 pm

The ending of Chapter 3 will be firmly filed away as one of the best sequences in the entire Yakuza series. The warehouse meeting. The single shot fired killing the witness. The double crosser being cornered by the entirety of the Tokyo Police Force. THE BOAT CHASE! Coming back to shore and Tanimura handcuffs himself to the perp and they do this incredible dance/fight. It was a great chain of events and the coup de grâce with the single gunshot heard outside of Homeland? Oh man.

I’m ready to get Kiryu in the mix, it’s been too long since we’ve hung out so I’m ready to boogie. I’ve pushed myself to really finish up all the loose ends in Tanimura’s chapter. I did all the Police Scanner missions, all sub-stories, dated both of the hostesses to completion, if you know what I mean, and helped Nair with all her training and missions. I think this chapter has been my favorite, and not just because of Tanimura. Nair’s section was really excellent. I joked her entire story and missions and training and everything could have been its own standalone Sega Saturn beat-em-up. Some of the stuff RGG crams into these games is insane.

May 21, 2025 / 9:19 am

Substories in Yakuza 4

May 29, 2025 / 7:18 pm

I haven’t updated this in a while, the last post was a meme I made about the Kiryu’s sub-stories, which are so perfect to be honest. I’ve made my way through Kiryu’s chapter and holy shit - that final scene on the rooftop!

I’m now well into the “Finale” chapter and after the deluge of cut-scenes, the betrayals, the backstabs, the double-crosses, the emotional support group for those that loved Yasuke, I’ve firmly planted this in the top S-Tier slot of the Yakuza library. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted, our four characters, hanging out, being sad, offering each other a shoulder. It’s been really quite incredible, the thing that holds this game back a bit for me are the minigames. Fighter-Maker and Hostess-Maker both leave me flat much like the fighters when they take a nap. I’m pretty willing to put up with a lot of tedium in games, especially when rewarded with some goofy-ass or heartfelt storyline that takes out of the menus of the minigame and into the streets of Kamurocho to doll out some old-fashioned yakuza street justice! But these minigames are all tedium and no pay-off. I’ve finished three of the fighters and 1 of the hostesses and I think I’m ready to move on from both of those and, I’m willing to admit, I’m ready to move on from the game. I want to see the conclusion of the story. I don’t know if that comes tonight or not, but it’s going to happen soon.

Jun 14, 2025 / 9:16 pm

HOLY SHIT THAT’S A WRAP ON YAKUZA 4! That ending was amazing. Hold on wait a second, before we get to that let’s wrap up what we accomplished.

The last time I wrote I said I was ready to move on and then a whole ass new Nintendo console came out so I got a bit distracted. Switch 2, Mario Kart World, ICE Raids in LA, Onimusha 2 deadlocking me at the finale - so much has happened! It was also my birthday which put me out of commission for a few days due to events and whale watching, among other things. But! I made a little time here and there to come back and clean up some things in Yakuza 4.

I finished all of Kiryu’s sub-stories! Which was cool because it unlocked the super-secret sub-story where you and your three best friends go on a secret journey to Okinawa and fuck up 4 asshole assassins. These four fights were pretty tough but i was able to get through them with a little bit of trial and error. It took me maybe two hours of messing about.

Fuck these guys, haha

After that I made sure that I took care of all the hostesses that you could date that weren’t working at Akiyama’s club. The next thing I wanted to do was make sure that I took care of all the fights in the colliseum you can do with Kiryu and then I was ready. I really wanted to eat all the food but it would have been such a grind. The time it would take for you to fight and hurt yourself enough to eat or drink more than one thing? Forever. It just wasn’t worth it. Here is a pretty bad phone picture I took of my completion status.

Could be better, but could be worse

Back at the club house, everyone was feeling real sad. I love that these four men are just with each other. There are some side stories that put our men into each others’ hands - like the Amon substory or the one with Date and the baby (lol). Often times with a story like this, they would add in conflict with the people who are trying to fight the same things. I wanted them to get along, to love one another! I didn’t think it was going to happen, so seeing the four of them all dressed up, showing their last respects to Yasuko while being emotionally available to each other was exactly what I wanted.

I like the way the finale was formatted, but after playing NieR Automata through to the end, I’ll never really look at a multi-protagonist finale again. Yakuza 4 lays out the story, sets up the bosses and systematically, 1 by 1, you get to knock them down. it’s a good affair and the last fight between Tanimura and Munakata is great. You have to take care of low-level bodyguards and then stronger bodyguard bosses before you can beat the shit out of an old man. It’s great!

Final Thoughts

In the giant money pyramid that is Yakuza games, if the helicopter were to come and blow away only the best of the games, even though this game felt like it was missing a few things, it would be blown away on the merit of the story and protagonists. Yakuza 0 still stands up as my favorite of the series, and Yakuza 1 is top notch, unrivaled when it comes to pitting brother against brother, but Yakuza 4 has Akiyama and Tanimura. Yakuza 4 puts five extremely fit men in a room and asks the question “What if they were sensitive? What if they loved one another?”

games | The Bouncer

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 10:16:46 -0700

THE BOUNCER!!!!!!!

I’ve been in a lull recently, a slump, I haven’t really wanted to do much of anything, game related with the exception of take on a hunt or two in either Wilds or Generations Ultimate. Occasionally I’ll find myself seizing up like a stuck bolt and nothing will knock it loose until one day schwack - something will come along and give me a healthy dose of WD-40 and a hearty wack with the back of a wrench. After a very busy stint of work/travel/family I found myself with a quiet Saturday and a friend who was willing to mess around with a game that was on both of our backlogs.

I played this in 16x9 and didn't notice it was off until looking something up.

I played through this on the Steam Deck, but it’s a Playstation 2 game. In fact its one of the few games on the system that took advantage of the DualShock 2’s pressure sensitive face buttons. This is a cool mechanic that means the way you press X will be the difference between a light attack or a heavy attack. This is super cool, in theory, until you learn that PlayStation has a patent on this technology and most other controllers other than the DS2 & 3 do not have this functionality. The emulator I was using defaulted to heavy attack, something I hadn’t noticed until I bought one of the characters’ Extra Moves and needed the game manual to decipher what their button scheme meant. I think if you hold L1+[BUTTON], and there wasn’t an Extra Skill applied, then you do some other kind of move. But without playing around with the emulator’s control scheme I couldn’t be sure that its causing a light attack.

The combat is good, but I’m tempted to reserve my judgement because I did not get to experience the full depth. As you fight through the levels and wave, your currently selected Bouncer will earn Bouncer Points, these are used to buy upgrades as well as additional moves. In my time with the game (~6 hours) I purchased maybe 5 of these Extra Skills. I was worried that I would be stuck with only heavy attacks, given my problems with the buttons. The moves I did unlock were good additions to the repertoire, but I really need to see this in action on proper hardware in hopes to see how everything congeals, how well you can string combos together. As it stood, until I started through in the extras and using L1 to change up the attack style, most attacks would just knock down the enemy. For a game like this you really want to be able to get a hit in during an opening and then use follow-up moves to string a combo together, before they fall down, where hopefully you have one more move that can do floor damage. My combo streaks were not great, but it was still fun.

When I started this game it was overcast, and by the time I got into what would be my first run, the rain was so hard that I could almost not hear the sounds of Dog Street coming out of my tv. The Bouncer is part movie, part choose-your-own-adventure and all 3D beat-em-up. It ended up being the perfect game for a lazy day - or two as my experience with it spilled into the following Sunday. I think the fun of this game is has by directly engaging with the characters and story. There is a moment in the story where you are outside of a train station and Volt yells “when you hear the whistle it’s time to get on.” Sure enough there was a whistle, and I still hadn’t beaten all of the enemies on the platform. The game cuts in and our bumbling heroes are seen running towards a moving train, two of them jump on and the third, Sion, is falling behind. He picks up the pace and jumps! A hand reaches out and snatch he’s pulled to safety on the back of this train. It was a fun moment, and on my follow-up playthrough (where I chose Volt the entire way through) I managed to defeat all those enemies on the platform and the three of them walked onto the train without issue.

Jump, Sion, Jump!

This is one part - a big part - of the fun of The Bouncer. Small changes, bits of lore, character development and backstory all unfolding over the 2-hours of gameplay. Getting to experience this story from different viewpoints and making small changes in the story is the meat on the plate - the entire meal is based around this premise. The game is on the shorter side and it rewards you for playing through a few times. It also lets you carry your progression through - characters will maintain levels and moves purchased. This is helpful because if you restart with a weaker character, your bros will be all big and strong and able to take more punches while you run around all scared.

The way this game changes character perspectives is possibly it’s most feature. After each cutscene, just before a fight, you get to choose your character through a character selection screen - a mechanic which is doing double duty. You aren’t just choosing who to control in the upcoming fight but it’s also a de facto dialogue tree. Whichever of the three bouncers you choose, they’ll be the one to respond to the moment, they are the one you fight with and after that fight their story is the one the game tells. There are sections of the game where this results in small asides or simple reaction shots - I’ve very much enjoyed seeing these three times over. The more you get invested in these dummies the more you’ll want to hang out with them - there are also big sections that break apart the gang. In one run-through you’ll show up to a room and not know how the other two bouncers ended up there. Playing through as one of them will reveal those secrets! These are some of the most rewarding, you’re seeing this story play out from three perspectives while also knowing how to use your character. Have you put enough points into stats? Do you have the right moves to help you get through gauntlets with no save points and no health refreshes? It has its challenging moments, but if you’ve played other beat-em-ups or character action games its not insurmountable.

Look at these adorable dummies.

It’s a fascinating game, it does things I don’t think other 3D beat-em-ups have done, but I guess I’m not familiar enough with the genre to make that judgement. I’m inclined to walk back to some older 3D beat-em-ups like Die Hard Arcade (1996), Dynamite Cop (1999), Zombie Revenge (1999) or Fighting Force (1997) to see if this stands up with those, if it is an advancement of the genre in anyway. My feeling would be the story, writing and voice acting, along with the character story routes could stand up as some of the best of the genre. Rappy, the friend who came along on this journey, had completely different experiences than me. He too had a great time, almost more so than I, commenting he

“[wished] there were like a zillion of these bouncerlikes”

and I whole-heartedly agree! Blending narrative pathways and unique cut-scenes with any kind of gameplay of choice seems like a win. I wish the conversation around this game was more about the work that went into trying something new and unique, a game that tried to push a genre beyond stage-stage-boss archetypes, using it as a vehicle to tell an evolving, unique story. It’s funny, littered with self-deprecating humor and light ribs across all the characters really giving you a senese that these characters have history. You start the game already in the middle of these characters stories, which is one of the more common complaints about this game, and I sort of agree. There are loading screens that deliver little blips of lore through short scripts, memories from your current characters’ pasts. Since I was emulating this it was tough to read, but I was able to read them through screenshots. To me, this made the world, and the story that plays out - which is ALL about people re-connecting later in life; examining your orbits, seeing who you still have connections with though you haven’t spoken in years - that story ends up being more believable as a result. And finally, it really helps dangle the carrot to get you to go back in.

Final Thoughts

I’m forcing myself to wrap this up because it feels like I’m on the verge (to be polite) of rambling. I should have used my thread system to type this out during but in the moment I was ready to fucking game. I liked this game so much, it felt so fresh that its making me roll out a new way to classify games. I will never be satisfied with rating things out-of-so-many-stars, trying to scale something out-of-10 doesn’t really convey my feelings about a game. I’ll go into this further in a blog post, but for now, let me introduce you to BUFF CERTIFICATION. If a game has that something-something that really clicks, that closes the circuit between my prefrontal cortex and amygdala, it can be classified as certified buff. So congratulations, team who made The Bouncer, your game is officially BUFF CERTIFIED.

blog | The End of Travels With Charley

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:15:26 -0700

I’m not going to call this a book review, but it’s me talking about reading a book, how that book made me feel, how I reacted to those feelings and maybe even some critiques about the writing - or author - or content, yet despite all this I maintain the position that, no, this is not a review of a book. I will warn you that there could be spoilers, so if you’ve never read the book and want to go in fresh, perhaps you skip this.*

When I first started this book, I was certain the dog would not make it out alive. I had written the ending myself, signed the warrant for the titular French poodle and sent him down the green mile. There, at the end, with every page turned, I could feel my hands choking up on the cold steel of the knife switch, which when thrown kachunk would seal the fate of our furry traveling companion. And here, so certain was I just 5 days ago, I sit in the seat of an airplane without tears in my eyes, knowing that Charley got to live out his days in Sag Harbor, pronouncing his F’s ftt* and going about his days, doing this and that or nothing in particular the way his French teachers would have wanted. Or, at least this is the idealized vision of his life as I’m not quite sure that’s what had happened.

This could be the fastest I’ve finished a book. Started on an airplane as I left my home in Los Angeles to visit my parents in Massachusetts, only for us to pile into a van and drive, along with a black haired Cocker Spaniel, to meet with my Fiancées family in Ohio - a celebration of our engagement! It, the book, felt a fitting travel companion - Colby the Cocker Spaniel would prove to be more of an acquaintance than Charley, as he’s taken to imprinting on my parents, them and them alone own his heart, though he may tolerate you scratching his ears or patting his rear he’d as soon move on to the lap of my mom or the side of my dad and deliver you a dirty look as thanks. As I flew for the first leg of this journey I had thrown the book in my bag and started it as we taxied the runway.

I feel as though I’m giving an impression of my past self, through examples of past actions, that make me sound like an scatterbrained and irresponsible person. Unfinished rolls of film, abandoned websites, projects unrealized - perhaps in the past I was distracted by the things all young men are distracted by; hope for a future with someone you love, the prospect of a fulfilling or profitable career, the bottom of a good or cheap bottle - possibly more than one: the wandering eye of an artist can be a difficult thing to train and wander around it must in order to settle focus on things that it can carry across the line. I’ve had my tastes evolve and as I age I feel as though I’m able to, now, especially now by god, appreciate understand be-critical-of and experience things better than I did in my youth. Previously it was for them. Now, this is for me. And you, I guess, as I write this for a website, but no one really reads this anyway, so I maintain, steadfast this is for me.

As I read, on the plane, at near page 60 my erratic past-self reared up; a bookmark fell to the floor. Sixty pages! And not a thing remembered or felt familiar aside the name of his truck, Rocinante - a name I have never heard pronounced, have not looked up how to pronounce, and will continue to pronounce differently each time I read it, be it here or in Quixotic legend. By the time that flight landed - hooked - post one crying session early on, I had gotten through more than twice what my past-self had. And why shouldn’t I? He was a dummy hell bent on destroying himself, and I am an engaged sophisticate, on the hunt for the answers and solutions to problems I didn’t even know I had, all while I’ve still got my wits about me.

I feel so acquainted with the author that in my nightly Journal I’d refer to him as John, not Steinbeck or Mr. Steinbeck, no formalities with us, I’ve been introduced to him, shared coffee and whiskey with him, have even been granted permission to tour his beloved steed and commiserate with his dog, addressing him as anything other than ‘John’ just feels inappropriate - but I will not be caught calling him Juanito.

John, as he meanders across the country in his unique way, shows us a vision of America that feels unchanged, recognizable by the same plights, joys and struggles - 1960 and 2025 will have more in common with regards to social issues and civics than it should. In a way, his descriptions of the family fights about the elections and Republicans versus Democrats should come as no shock, but we’ve been conditioned to believe that these things have been so far exacerbated by todays extremism that we may forget the crowds of southerners cheering the exclusion of black and POC students as they began their struggles with integrating public schools. This wasn’t that long ago, it’s always been extreme and states rights has always been an excuse for racist laws. John spoke, with what I can only describe as a left-leaning centrist rhetoric that was more than likely shocking to many readers at the time - his actions and personal stories being very clear that he feels segregation wrong and sad and disillusioning, but he never comes right out and says, it is implied, subtly, if you can call kicking a man out of your truck while pretending to search for a gun that doesn’t exist subtle. These days I prefer someone to flat out announce they think racism is wrong and that segregation is bad, there is no more time for nuance, nor time for centrism.

John and I share several views of our country; the Midwest is too large and flat, the central coast of California is one of the greatest areas touched by the painterly hand of God, the nonsense over the idea of Texas is inflated (much like everything in Texas) and New England breeds stout, stern people who know how to survive a winter. These things remain unchanged by time. I would love to know what he thinks of the population explosion of Salinas, Monterey and Santa Cruz as it stands now, or of the current hogwash happening in our government (There I go with centerist rhetoric - hogwash). As he visited his home of Salinas he walked a hill where he was able to pin-point important and personal moments from his childhood and his parents lives, and the fondness he speaks of those moments and the willingness to be in those memories and remembrances made me cry. I fear that as I age and my parents move on, I may see my childhood one last time and abandon it forever, not because of some deep seeded hatred of it or from where I come from, but in the way that you fall out of touch with an old friend - you don’t set out to talk to someone for the last time, it’s just one of those thieves in life that sneaks up on you and picks your pocket of contact. A sad part of being a human who has stress and loves and dreams and sadness.

John presents himself like a man who was never afraid of being afraid, and never shielded himself from the pain of needing to express emotion. Though he sounded stout and strong, he was that certain kind of passionate and caring man that I hope to be. With all things generational, like him, I hope to be not only unmoved by change in the name of progress, but I hope to understand change I don’t understand as maybe change not meant for me. He knew that Salinas was destined to be more than a dusty cannery town and that southern schools shouldn’t stay segregated, even if these things could be scary or foreign to some.

I think in my lifetime, just as in anyone with blood rushing through their veins, I’ve suffered through plenty of Great Heartbreaks - the loss of my first dog, the young death of a best friend, the bitter defeat of my first relationship, and never having had the pleasure of eating tacos with Jonathan Gold. Now, having finished Travels with Charley, I add never having experienced coffee with John Steinbeck. To be with him, watching him brew his coffee, making conversation while he pours, observing him listening carefully to my answers and then being rewarded with him reaching for a bottle - it would be an experience worth all the weight carried by Rocinante, the drink that warmed the soul for ages, and to receive that bottle as a gift? My god the pain I feel on my soul - it is cut deep and all I can do to mend the wound is to live my life the same way; always offer coffee, don’t be concerned if the accompanying bottle isn’t top shelf, pour a little extra when you’ve just got going. And don’t forget to listen, to your guests and to your Charley (or Charlie).

bleets | April 19, 2025

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 23:55:53 -0400

Hi Gracie, thanks for giving me the kick in the pants to get my RSS feed up and running. It’s a top priority soon.

games | Switch 2 Whomp Whomp

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:12:41 -0700

Sad Horn noise

So the Switch 2 reveal happened! The direct was less-than as it skirted around the big issue on everyone’s mind, the price! How much is this thing going to cost? And of course, the biggest bitch of the bunch is the fact that on the same day, the great wave of tariffs was announced, shrouding what should have been an exciting day of learning about a new Nintendo system and talking shit about it on the internet into a tidal wave of political discourse and fear! Fear that our stupid little lives won’t be able to afford our small treat because someone decides to do a pump-and-dump with the world economy, but, and this is a big but, we still talked shit, we still checked out the new system, we still got treated to two days of demonstrations on the Nintendo Tree-House, so let’s talk about cyberbuffalo’s feelings on the whole matter.

MONEY ON MY MIND

Before anything else, I have to say how confounding I find the entire video game price situation. Nintendo can be a world class leader in branding - to me anyway! I know there is a theory about the mishandling of the WiiU, that it was not branded properly - Nintendo should have known better than to put a big letter U after the name WII but it’s been shown that there were a lot of factors that lead us to the low sales volume of the WiiU. Whether you can agree with me or not, it’s hard to refute that they have picked it up in the past 7 years with the incredible branding and marketing of the Nintendo Switch. Everyone has a Switch, but not in the same way everyone had a Wii, they play games on it. And those games all cost up to 59.99. People who interact with more than just Nintendo games know the Switch has the cheapest games on the market, and that more modern consoles cost 69.99 for a game. BUT NOT ANYMORE! As the Nintendo website updated there were some revelations released out into the world that game pricing was no longer following an industry standard model. 79.99! is what Mario Kart: World is going to cost, and that feels outrageous. Even before we get to whether or not little Timmy and Tonya’s parents are going to be able to afford to get this under the Christmas tree, before we try to navigate the murky waters of how or if or when or why these prices are impacted by the tariffs (or not impacted by or if the tariffs exist or if we’re all just being mashed into proverbial protein balls in an alley and forced down the gullet of some rich turtle hurtling through space and time ahhhhhhh)…

BEFORE ALL THAT we have to really let ourselves understand that Nintendo pulled a pin on a grenade and tossed it, live, in slow motion, into the lap of the entire video game industry. Seventy Nine Ninety Nine plink - dunk dunt bunt… hisssssss BOOM! There are no rules anymore, if Nintendo can charge you 80 dollars for Mario Kart, Playstation can charge you 100$ for Last of Us 2 Remake - Remastered. I am not smart enough to predict how this ripple will be felt through the industry that has been struggling with acquisitions and closures or with a general public that is dealing with a looming global recession, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be great!

These men may not be the arbiters of truth

The bigger point of interest here to me, is that Nintendo completely lost control of the narrative. Do an internet search for $90 Nintendo games and you’ll see no shortage of youtube videos, articles, reddit posts and social media comments saying “Nintendo is charging 90 dollars for switch games!” And that’s not even true, they’ve completely lost control of this narrative and it is going to be hard to get it back in line, if not damned near impossible. Mario Kart World Costs 79.99, digitally and physically, in the United States (pre-tariff, though, so subject to change) but in the UK they could be charging more for physical games (also pre-world wide trade war, so YMMV) but if you want to buy Tears of the Kingdom with the Switch 2 upgrade pack that’s 79.99 unless you own the base game on Switch then it costs 9.99 digitally but if you’ve got the Nintendo Switch Online with Expansion Pack service than it is included in your 49.99$ subscription (or 79.99 for the expanded family subscription). This is NONSENSE - IT’S COMPLETE NONSENSE AND EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THIS KIND OF PRICING STRUCTURE NEEDS TO REEVALUATE THEIR LIVES.

It was bad enough to try to decipher the Xbox Game Pass and Sony PS+ Subscription models, which games come with which tier, which games are coming and which are being pulled. Up to now the Nintendo services have been pretty clear, and the games were 59.99 or less. This new pricing structure is going to alienate a lot of people, not because they can’t afford it - because no one should have to live like this!

Gimme a Gimmick

Now that’s out of the way I can talk about the games, the hardware and the features. Really my main take-a-way is that it’s strange living in a timeline when Nintendo can offer games that run, on console, at 4k60fps. My Series X does not do that with most current-gen games. For Nintendo to bring this as a feature, almost as if its the consoles main gimmick, to bring this front-and-center is a bit of a different Nintendo than we’ve seen in the past. I’m for it, give me well designed games that are fun and interesting while looking and playing great? That’s a win-win-win. They’ve built this up so much I really hope they can continue to deliver on this.

The game sharing and Zoom-style streaming is cool and a unique way to bring the on-console party up to a new standard, it feels like a no brainer now that we’ve all lived through the pandemic and have adapted to video conferencing as a standard form of meeting. To me, though, this isn’t a remarkable enough gimmick for Nintendo to hinge it’s entire next-generation console on. The camera peripheral is intriguing, if only because it gives me hope for a revival of Xbox Arcade Kinect titles, possibly even reviving some long forgotten titles or rescuing them from the clutches of obscurity. Yes I’m talking about Diabolical Pitch, no I’m not even remotely trying to hide it.

A screencap of Grasshoppers 'Diabolical Pitch'

Lastly but certainly not least - the mouse functionality - is very cool and I hope that it gets supported in the most aggressive, wii-era-like ways with strange games coming out of the woodworks in massive shovelware collections. I also hope that games like Knights in the Nightmare and Mario Paint get brought over. It does feel like this would be a great way for them to bring some of that DS magic back to the console but I’m not sure its enough to spawn an entire gaming revolution.

Games-o-rama

So the meet of it all, the games! What good is all this hardware without anything to play one them? To be perfectly honest this is the part that is almost the least interesting to me. The games haven’t been super exciting, save a few entries. I’m not going through them all but here is what I found interesting.

Tears of the Kingdom & Breath of the Wild Upgrade Pack

Seeing the improvements to these games is so jarring. They did a side-by-side of BotW and it almost didn’t feel real. I think sometimes you lose a bit of the cartoon/ghibli look when you apply mom & dad’s Thanksgiving day motion smoothing, but it still felt pretty. I do think the phone integration feels like a proof of concept for things to come and aren’t a thing that people are going to use en masse. Before the 1st Nintendo Switch was officially revealed, I predicted that we’d be hooking joy-cons up to a grip with a vertical phone in between and they would extend the game capabilities to this second screen. It really felt at the time that Nintendo wouldn’t be abandoning the dual screen gimmick they’ve been pushing since the inception of the DS - well really, since the cable that let you hook up the GBA to the Gamecube. But that never came to fruition outside of some veiled voice chat and a few specific game tools that gave you information. Now we can see some realtime information and data being passed back and forth. To me this is the thing to keep an eye out for as it could become the systems most interesting feature, but it could also be left by the wayside.

Mario Kart: World

Before the reveal of this game and it’s core features, I really didn’t know what they could possibly do to top MK8D. 68 Million copies of 8 Deluxe have been sold, it has 96 total courses and an extremely vibrant online community. What could they do to top this? Well they reinvented the game and I am excited to see how it plays out!

Donkey Kong: Bananza

It’s Bananza, like banana, not bonanza like a burning map and a jaunty cowboy tune. Look, this game looks fun as hell and will honestly be a system seller for me, personally. Pulling chunks out of the grown and blasting through a mountainside? Digging holes STRAIGHT DOWN FOREVER? COMPLETELY DESTROYING THE MAP WITH PERSISTANT DAMAGE?? It just looks great. DK’s redesign is also a nice surprise, he looks so cool, just like a Nintendo trading card from the 90s or from the Game Boy game. It takes the same approach as BotW or many other revived or updated Nintendo IPs from the Switch era - let’s boil the game down to it’s core, give you a new kind of freedom or an abundance of feature and then let you run wild, and Donkey Kong is the perfect subject for this approach.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

Psychic abilities! It seems like a really great hook for this series. The opening section they showed off on the Treehouse really showed off the power of the console. There was a big group of enemies attacking and a big group of soldiers fighting alongside samus (i’m sorry I don’t know Metroid lore very well). It looked EXCITING and GRANDIOSE! Samus isn’t starting off the game in solitude, she’s helping fight a war. I will get this, and I will be playing it with mouse controls!

NEW AMIIBO!

Fuck yeah, new Amiibo! This may not be common knowledge but I’m an amiibo freak. I have built special shelves in our living room in order to facilitate all of our little buddies. While I haven’t been going for a complete set, I’m sure as hell like to pick up the random third party ones. So I will more than likely get these chonky Street Fighter 6 amiibo. I might let the cards go by the wayside but it all depends on how they will be sold. I will also be getting the new Tears of the Kingdom amiibo. I’m happy this was in the Switch 2 announcement - it feels like it was an announced commitment to the line. While I would love to see them begin to let third parties experiment with using Amiibo in ways they may not have thought about, but for now I’m just happy there are some official, mostly affordable, cool little action figures of some of my favorite video games, and that our only options are not 2500$ statues.

Gamecube Games

I am honestly surprised about this. The gamecube is ripe for revival, for sure, but that library could be upscaled and sold as a remaster or a re-release. I’m happy that they will continue to expand their Nintendo Classics line-up - please don’t take that as a wish for being sold more games with changes as opposed to letting us play games the way they were intended, emulation not-withstanding. As for the games, I love Wind Waker but I guess I would have preferred the HD release, just because it was such a solid release. F-Zero seems cool, though I’m not really a fan of that series, merely for lack of exposure. I was happy to see Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the scroll-by, that game is expensive and I feel like it’s overlooked. I’ve played a bit of it in the past and I think it’s a solid entry. Soulcalibur 2 is cool, that’s a fun one especially with Link being playable. I’m also excited to see Chibi Robo in the conversation, I think more people should get to play that Happy Simulator.

No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES

I liked thie first game, I never played the second game (though I do own it), but I’m excited to see this series continue on! It is a surprise that it was the lead game of the series, honestly good for them! This seems like a cool game and it was exciting to see it included.

Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion

WHAT THE…? THE MECH FROM DAEMON X MACHINA, FROM THE JAPANESE PUBLISHER MARVELOUS… AN ARSENAL?! After this part in No More Heroes 3 I really wished I had bought and played a copy of Daemon x Machina, it looked cool and I was excited when it came out but I just never got around to it. It kept getting pushed further and further down the list until I forgot about it. I’m glad that it got a sequel, a sequel that I will probably be picking up.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

I’m going to be shouting this from the mountain top please PLEASE buy and play this game. You will be rewarded with a really great and unique experience. This is going to launch with the system on June 5th.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

I have enjoyed every entry into the Hyrule Warriors series and I cannot imagine this will be any different. The first game is the most game for your dollar a Zelda fan could come across. It’s got an insane amount to do in it and it’s all skinned to really reward you for being a Zelda fan. The second was a really great romp through the world of Breath of the Wild, a what if…? style story that opened up even more. Like a friend of mine waxing about any entry into the Star Wars franchise, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, it’s just nice to be able to spend time in that world, in that universe again.

Kirby and the Forgotten Lands: Star Crossed World

I really enjoyed this secret character action / hack & slash game, but I’m not sure tacking on a DLC and calling it a next-gen game sits right with me. Does this DLC really do anything with all of that extra processing power? Probably not. I guess, ultimately, who cares? because we get more Kirby. I’ll play this DLC.

Kirby Air Riders

Another Kirby game! I never played the original on Gamecube so I don’t really have any expectations. Sakurai is a great dev so I’m more interested in playing his game than whatever that game may be!

Final Thoughts

Besides the murky waters of the release and prices and postponement of pre-orders and the towering threat of tariffs troubling the release over all, I guess it was pretty exciting. Until I sat down with this write-up I wasn’t too sure if I was happy or excited, discontented or despondent with the news. It’s hard feeling hip-hip-hooray over much these days, which is why I would be setting up in the grandstands for a marketing presentation to begin with, it’s a great distracting. I have liked seeing the callouts to gamergate assholes who have been screaming for years to “Keep politics out of games” as Nintendo literally had to pause their launch because politics have directly affected video games, some of the more wholesome games to boot. Of course they’ve never been inclined to keep their politics out of games, just things they want to suppress or oppress.

Will I pre-order this? If i’m allowed, I’ll certainly try. Honestly my main motivation might be trying to lock-in a pre-tariff price, but who knows if that would even be effective. I like the expanded video chat functionality, but I think this would have suited me better a few years ago. If the camera peripheral works well and brings back a forgotten Grasshopper Game (or other lost Kinect titles) then I’m all for it. And obviously we’re going to get some Mario Paint and that’s very much a good thing.

galleries | The Sunken City in 2013

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 17:48:03 -0700

In 2013 I shot this Rolleicord III with some expired slide film. I walked around The Sunken City and the Friendship Bell tyring to figure out how to use this ancient device. The results were okay. There are a few photos here that I enjoy but for the most part they are over or under. I’m going to take this out again but I wanted to post this as a record of my own progress. I don’t care that there are failures on this website. My life is full of accidents and mistakes, but those have all gotten me to here. Being able to look back on those is helpful, it’s healthy, it helps us grow. quoteUnquoteBadPhotos are no different. Maybe there is no such thing as a bad photo. But more likely, maybe there is.

galleries | Carlsbad Flower Fields

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 17:13:41 -0700

It’s springtime and that means, well it means a few things and one of those things is cleaning. I’ve been digging around in my office which resides on the bottom floor of our warehouse, underneath the stairs that go up. Theres a fair amount of storage under there and what did I dig out? SURPRISE more cameras and film. Amongst those cameras was the intrepid Olympus XA2! I knew I had one of these somewhere. Unlike the XA, I never even started to use this camera so there was no film in it. I don’t think I had ever shot it before and I was excited to try it out. Catrena and our friend Cristina had made plans to get dressed up in fun springtime outfits and hit up the flower fields in Carlsbad, CA, what better way to spend the day trying out a new camera? Colorful! Vibrant! Nature! EXCELLENT!

I’ve always read that people prefer these cameras, the XA2 has a very good reputation. I’m sold on the XA already, it’s such a great camera, how could it’s sibling with a slower lens and zone focus outperform it?

The results

Well I love the results. The colors are vibrant, it has a nice vignette to it, especially in daylight and I nailed the focus on every single picture. That last point was my biggest concern! Zone focus cameras can be tricky but it almost feels like maybe it doesn’t even matter because every single picture was SHARP. It was easier and faster to shoot then the XA and the results are just as nice, maybe even nicer! It would be fun to add the same film to both cameras and go shoot them both at the same time. I haven’t tried the flash attachment yet but I imagine it’s going to work pretty well. There are two photos I took at dinner that I missed focus on, but considering it was extremely low light there is no camera shake happening which I thought was impressive.

I’m going to throw some black and white in and play with that but as of right now, I’m very impressed with it and will continue to use it!

cameras | Olympus XA2

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:53:58 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

olympus

model

format

35mm

style

viewfinder

lens

D.Zuiko

addl

under exposure light in viewfinder

aperture

ƒ3.5-ƒ22

battery

1x 357 / SR44 / LR44

exposure-type

automatic

flash

accessory flashes available

focal-length

35mm

focus

zone focus with 3 settings

iso-range

25-800

self-timer

true

shutter

leaf

Sample Galleries

Carlsbad Flower Fields

cameras | Rolleicord III

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:53:48 -0700

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Rollei

model

Rolleicord III (Model K3B)

format

120

style

TLR

lens

Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar ƒ3.5

flash

B & X-Sync

focal-length

75mm

format2

35mm with Rolleikin 1 accessory

negative

6x6

shutter

Compur

shutter-speed

B to 1/250 second

taking-lens

Zeiss Heidosmat ƒ3.2/75mm

Sample Galleries

The Sunken City in 2013

bleets | April 01, 2025

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:19:36 -0700

Good night, nerds.

bleets | April 01, 2025

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:45:07 -0700

Oh man I just got back a roll of film I shot with my Olympus XA2 and it’s gorgeous. I was enjoying the XA, but I may be falling in love the XA2.

bleets | March 31, 2025

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:45:14 -0700

This discord update is absolutely killing me.

games | Switch 2 Dreams

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:42:07 -0700

48 Hours Remain

As the official Nintendo Direct to reveal the follow-up to the Switch looms, I thought I would take some time to think back on the original Switch launch, the games that I loved from the deep catalogue and think to the future, what do I want out of the Switch 2?

The Past

When the original Switch launched, I was just getting back into video games after a long hiatus. I was still fond of games, and I had kept a lot of my childhood games, either with me or at my parents’ house. But for years I was out of the game, not interested, or they didn’t fit into my lifestyle. In retrospect, I wish I had held onto a handheld system, or purchased the 3DS much sooner because that would have better suited me, but at the time I had other priorities. The first year my current Fiancée and I started dating I had bought us a Wii U, after a visit home with a layover to see my friend Rappy. He was the herald of the virtues of the Wii U complete with demonstrations and hands on proselytisation.

The two screens - what a gadget - the games - Mario Kart’s still around! - the excitement of discovering something new again! Upon returning home, we went to Fry’s (RIP) and came out with the full kit. It was exciting! That Christmas I bought us both 3DS units, Animal Crossing and each a Pokémon game. I had started to get bit by the Nintendo Bug once again. As the end of the Wii U life was in sight, I still a fresh convert who hadn’t been through all the pains and droughts was greeted with the online hype machine that could be the Nintendo NX and all the rumors were fascinating. I remember sitting in our old apartment watching the first E3 presentation of Breath of the Wild with awe and excitement, getting ready for the release.

AbraCatrena with our new Switch!

We hadn’t secured a pre-order, but the weekend of release we marched around LA to various retailers until waiting in line at a Target that clearly didn’t have enough units to go around, someone spilled the beans that a nearby Toys ‘R’ Us (RIP) had stock. The race was on! We arrived before open, it was still early in the day, we knew our best chances to get a unit was to show up before opening. The line was forming when we arrived but we were less than 10 away from the front. The crowd was excited! The door opened, at least an hour before the store was set to open and the announcement was made - “We have plenty of Nintendo Switch Units available and we will let you in before open!” I still think back on this moment with fondness and then roll my eyes when I think about the VC unit that dismantled Toys’R’Us.

Breath of the Wild was a revelation to me. I know there were people that complained, especially at first or during previews before launch, that the tower mechanic was played out, the Ubisoftication of Zelda was not their Zelda, but to me, someone that had been away from muck and mire of video games since 2007… 2008, I thought it was incredible (and it still is incredible, even after Tears of the Kingdom came back around and remixed the formula again, Breath of the Wild still stands as one of the greatest video games of all time, at least to me). This is the era of the Switch, for me. It’s taking something that feels so familiar and remixing it just enough to become something groundbreaking - it feels so new but I know it so well! I want more of this for the next round.

Top 5 things I want from the Switch 2!

5. A Unified Online Service

I think the retro offerings from Nintendo are great and for the most part they work really well. When it was just the NES and SNES I could understand why they would separate the programs but now that we’ve got all manner of subscription based, packaged emulators, I think it’s time to group them all into one offering. It would be great to not have to launch 5 different programs to check out the games on offer. It would also be great if they add control binding so I could finally wrap my head around playing the N64 handheld. Also I think they need to add DS games.

4. A Better Joy-Con experience

I think the controllers on offer are my least favorite thing abou the Switch. We all know the sticks drift, but the thing that really gets my goat is how bad the d-pad is on the pro-controller. It makes playing Tetris 99 practically impossible due to phantom drops. “Cyberbuffalo, just use the joy-cons, idiot” you might say but to you I’d lob back the issues with inconsistent connectivity. On each Switch I’ve owned, when used in split mode, the Joy-Cons will (specifically the left) will desync and search fairly consistently and that doesn’t make for a good time. So fix them and the pro-controller d-pad!

3. Backwards Compatability

This is already confirmed but it’s such an important thing for me that I wanted to put it here anyway. We need this to be fairly straightforward with no funny business. I should be able to setup my account and watch the games roll in along with all appropriate save files. Lets make this happen, Nintendo, you can do it!

2. The Return of StreetPass

There is a level of social interaction the Nintendo wanted you to try with the Switch that in theory seemed possible, but I’ve yet to wow a group of people at a rooftop party by passing around the Joy-Cons. Nintendo wanted us all to connect with one another and pass the controller and play the games - we’re at the airport and have all we need; let’s race! But what they could do to proliferate the social standing of the Switch 2 is bring back StreetPass. I wish I was around when StreetPass was first demonstrated, I probably wouldn’t have though about it twice because it doesn’t matter how you describe it. It’s all predicated on receiving that flashing green light, an endorphin hit you couldn’t possibly understand until it happens to you. The original Switch was light on this patented brand of Nintendo gimmick but for me, this is what the Switch 2 needs most. It needs Nintendo to fly its freak flag higher. Maybe we’re inviting a whole new host of Miis to the StreetPass gates - help me solve this puzzle, seed my flowers, race my slot cars & play rogue-lite ghost Tetris! A whole new era of games, incentive to bring your Switch2 with you! Give us what we’re clamoring for, StreetPass2!

1. Mother Fucking Badge Arcade

Picture this. It’s 2026. You’ve just downloaded Capcom Arcade 3rd Stadium and you want to add it to your folder of retro game collections on your Switch 2. You turn on your switch and are greeted with a Nintendo News article that new badges have been added to Nintendo Badge Arcade 2! The bunny takes your hand and walks you through the arcade where you use your free daily credits to score some new badges! You then use those badges to decorate the custom home-screen folders for you retro game collection, and all is right with the world. The children are happy! Mom and dad stop fighting! World peace is one step closer to being obtained. Please. Folder customization and mother fucking Badge Arcade.

On to the future!

I have so many games I haven’t full explored, on Switch, that even if Nintendo went out of business tomorrow, I’d have enough to do with it to last me the rest of my life. Or at least into my fifties. I’m glad the Switch2 is coming out and I cannot wait to see what features - AND games - it has. Speaking of games, my top 5 franchises I would like to see return on Switch in the first 12-18 months.

5. Bayonetta

In some form or another! It could be a follow-up Viola game, another off-shoot like Bayonetta Origins (which I LOVED) or a full-blown Bayonetta 4.

4. Astral Chain

Surprise! Two character action games right out of the gate for me. This is such a sick game that it deserves a follow-up. I know there are some bad reports about the state of PlatinumGames but I’m hoping with Nintendo as a partner they can make another kick-ass entry in the AC series.

3. Star Fox

I like Star Fox and think that it needs to be revitalized. Maybe a hybrid adventure/space game, or even just a return to the classic formula. Star Fox Zero, I thought, was solid. But it didn’t blow me away (or anyone else for that matter). I think its time to try something new again.

2. AMIIBO FESTIVAL

I almost included Badge Aracde here as well, but after looking deep into my soul I finally knew what belonged. Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival is the entire reason that I’m an Amiibo collector. That goddamned game is the reason we have so many Amiibo cards (almost an entire set!). And if ANY OF YOU TOOK THE TIME TO ACTUALLY PLAY IT, you would have found the chillest, sickest, sometimes-frantic but always charming and cute board game on the Wii U. Like every single game in the Animal Crossing franchise, Amiibo Festival develops little by little as you play and expand the board. Its a fun experience, especially when catching up with friends or just chilling by the fire with your significant other. I think this game could be expanded further either by making it a Nintendo Wide experience, or fully embracing what it is and making it the worlds best Animal Crossing side game. There are bones there. Let my Amiibo shine - they deserve to tap tap tap - let me engage with them - roll my dice, Kicks! Haters be damned, this could be great!

1. Animal Crossing

Speaking of, I just want it. New Horizons was so great but felt like it was missing so many things that made the series great that I want them to come out swinging with a whole new entry in the game. (This was one of Rappy’s requests for the final direct and I think it’s good enough that it belongs on this list).

Final Thoughts

The Switch has been with us through a lot of great times and some not-so-great. It’s been a constant companion at home, all throughout the house, on long car rides, in the air, sometimes across the world. It’s an incredible device that really has changed the way we interact with games. No matter what Nintendo has planned for this direct, we’re definitely in for some surprises. But even if they just released a Switch one with new Joy-Cons and slightly better specs, I’d probably be happy.

cameras | Hanimex Vef Zoom

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 10:10:39 -0700

1 2 3 4

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

hanimex

model

VEF Zoom

format

110

style

Viewfinder

lens

aperture

ƒ/5.6 & ƒ/11

flash

accessory add-on VEF II Flash

focal-length

26-42mm

shutter-speed

fixed 1/125

I have yet to develop any film from this camera!

galleries | Traversing Seasons with Nikon Sport-Touch

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 18:44:30 -0700

I love getting film developed when I’ve been toting the camera around for a while. You get to see the year from this macro point of view that boils everything down to “big moments.” They don’t even have to be big, they are just events and a frame of celluloid coated with photo-reactive chemicals exposed to light and dipped into more chemicals at precisely the right temperatures for the right amount of time will bring you right back to that point in time. I can look at all of these pictures and know exactly what we were doing where we were doing it.

cameras | Nikon Sport-Touch

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 18:11:30 -0700

1 2 3 4

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Nikon

model

Sport Touch

format

35mm

style

Point and Shoot

lens

apeture

f/3.5

focal-length

35mm

focus

Auto-Focus

Sample Galleries

Traversing Seasons with Nikon Sport-Touch

cameras | Yashica Electro 35MC

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:53:07 -0700

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Yashica

model

Electro35 MC

format

35mm

style

viewfinder

lens

Yashinon-DX

aperture

f/2.8

battery

PX28 (4LR44)

focal-length

40mm

focus

Zone Focus

shutter

copal

I have yet to develop any film from this camera!

cameras | Rollei 35

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:45:08 -0700

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Rollei

model

Rollei 35

format

35mm

style

viewfinder

lens

aperture

f/3.5

battery

PX625

shutter-speed

B to 1/500 second

I have yet to develop any film from this camera!

games | March 2025 Direct Reaction

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:50:33 -0700

GOOD MORNING! It’s Nintendo Direct day and we’re up bright and early, eagerly awaiting the sound of that familiar “click!” we’ve grown so used to over these past 8 years. It’s crazy to think that this could be the last presentation that features the original Switch’s iconic branding. How will we fair with our predictions? Let’s find out! (NOTE: I’m not going to talk about everything shown off, just the things that I have comments on)

Right out of the gate, no introductions from the brass at Nintendo, straight into the first game!

Dragon Quest 1 + 2 HD Remaster

I feel lke we’ve been hearing about this for a while. It looks cool though I’m not sure if Dragon Quest games are for me.

No Sleep for Kaname Date

The third entry in the Somnium Files is coming! This game apparently adds a whole new mechanic which looks like variations of ‘Escape the Room’ puzzles. Feeling more like an entry in the Zero Escape series than the previous two titles. I’m here for it. I liked the first game but haven’t tried the second yet. All three need a playthrough.

Raidou: Remastered

Persona mixed with real-time hack and slash? This feels like a Persona adjacent game I may actually really enjoy. This is going on my list.

Shadow Labyrinth

I wish this game all the best because it’s a crazy concept. 2D platformer that is also Pac-Man but dark is really a great idea.

Patapon 1&2

FROM OUT OF LEFT FIELD HERE IT COMES, PATAPON A SERIES I THOUGHT WAS TIED TO PLAYSTATION FOREVER! In my mind Patapon was basically the Sony Pikmin so I’m very surprised they coming to Nintendo. I’m looking forward to this because I was half-way through the first when my trial of PSN expired and they booted me out mid-level! Bring it on! Holy shit, is the Nintendo Switch the new PSP???

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar

This is cool, first released on the DS as Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar. I like these but I don’t ever make time to play them.

Metroid Prime: Beyond

Dropped into the presentation as a “Look at this” title. I don’t know why, and I can’t explain it if you were to ask me, but this trailer had big 2007 energy. From the weird voice over, to the psychic powers, maybe its just because its the last time we saw a Retr Studios trailer. Either way, I think this great, the psychic powers look great and I’m ready for it.

Disney Villains Cursed Café

Who cares?

Witchbrook

I imagine this made a lot of people happy. Its been a long time coming for this, I think, and it looks cute. I like that it has multiplayer baked right into the core of it all.

Eternal Life of Goldman

I liked the art style of this and the animation is on point. The platforming looks challenging, which is good.

Gradius Origins!

This collection looks great. 7 or 8 titles of classic ‘shmup action plus a new title. Will keep an eye out for this.

Rift of the Necromancer

More indie rhythm action is always a good thing and this team has been great in the past and I think it’s worth a look if you like that style of gameplay.

Tamagotchi Plaza

smoke_weed_everyday.mp3

Pokemon Legends

I’m going to drop some cyberbuffalo knowledge right now. I’m not a Pokémon person. I’ve played them in the past, I think I had Pokémon blue in a gameboy when I was younger but it never clicked for me. I’ve spent time trying to get myself into the series, I even played a fair amount of Pokémon Go (who didn’t?)! But Sun & Moon and Sword & Shield, I tried both of them and my attention tanked both times. Pokémon is just not for me. This was no different, I felt my eyes glossing over during the trailer.

Rhythm Heaven: Groove

Its me

Hell yeah! This looks absolutely great. I don’t think you could have captured the tone of the world any better than they did with this trailer. I think this game is going to be great. It’s no Ouendan but it will certainly do!

Virtual Game Cards

I was watching this live and couldn’t for the life of me see where this was going to land. But the fact that they are making a consumer friendly move like being able to share digital titles across family accounts is great. And of course they are doing it in the most Nintendo way possible.

virtual game cards

High On Life

thumbs down fart sound

Star Overdrive

I haven’t heard of this one before. It’s by a studio called Caracal Games that made the game Downward in 2016. This game looks like some kind of open world, character action, hoverboard surfing puzzle game. Interesting, and something to keep an eye on.

Fantasy Life

The framerate shown off in this trailer was not great, and it makes me worry about the game as well as Level-5.

The Rest!

Monument Valley 1 & 2

I know these are well regarded games, but it really is a sign of the times that a port of two mobile games that came out over a decade ago are one of the bigger announcements.

Monument Valley 3

This is a cool announcement because its releasing the game from the corporate clutches of obscure platforms. This was a Netflix Games exclusive which means 6 people played it and 45 others couldn’t figure out how to install it.

Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots

THE NINTENDO SWITCH IS THE NEW PSP!!!

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

I didn’t play a lot of Tomodachi Life, but I did absolutely love Miitomo. This reminds me of Miitomo and I think that means I’ll be playing it. It’s just surprising to me that this was the last big reveal. Perhaps I underestimated the kind of draw that series has. Also, big woman.

Nintendo Today

I would have never guess this in a hundred million years but now that I’ve had some time to think about it, this should have been predictable. Nintendo is trying to get away from the Political bog that is Twitter and to do so they created an app that has one social media feed. Shout-out to the app designer who managed to make a better calendar app than Apple in the recent years. I like it, I have it set to the Zelda theme and I enjoy checking in on it.

Final Thoughts

Some of these announcements weren’t really surprises as much as they were just completely off my radar. I guess you could consider some of these stealth releases. I certainly wasn’t thinking Patapon could end up as a staple Switch game but I’m glad it’s coming out. It’s great to see that Nintendo is continuing to not just support the switch, they are hinging the entire company on it as the platform moving forward, and I for one think that’s a really smart idea.

Prediction results

So How did we do? It turns out, not great! Out of the four of us SlurpeeZombie was in the lead with 2 correct guesses (Pokémon Legends & Metroid Prime 4). I correctly guessed “something Pokémon related” so I guess that’s a point, and AbraCatrena nailed “…a shit-ton of games we’ll never think about again.” And the usually on-point, finger-on-the-pulse captain of industry Rappy came in with a hope and a dream, and those dreams were crushed.

I WILL be doing this again, send me an email at cyb3rbuffalo at gmail if you want in on this in the future.

games | March Nintendo Direct Predictions

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:56:54 -0700

Would you look at that! Nintendo has surprised us with an announcement that tomorrow morning (7AM for this West Coast dweller) they shall grace us with a Nintendo Direct! And for all of you champing at the bit for information on the elusive Nintendo Switch 2, they have also announced NO INFORMATION for that will be shared. This is going to be a send-off, the last hurrah of the little hybrid console that spawned an entirely new industry. So I thought I’d try something new here, I’ve polled some friends and asked for their predictions on what they think we’ll see tomorrow. On to the predictions!

Slurpeezombie

My friend and Monster Hunting companion, SlurpeeZombie has his sights set on something that we’ve all been waiting for but haven’t heard much about until very recently, Metroid Prime 4. His predictions:

Mario 3d platformer
Pokémon game they already announced getting more screen time
Metroid Prime 4

AbraCatrena

My fiancée is a little less hopeful about the line-up, thinking that there could be quite a bit of filler in the 30-some-odd minute presentation.

A mario game remake or remaster
“A Fuck-ton of games we don’t care about” random sports games and stuff you’ll see once and never see again
A new switch special edition

Rappyland

Rappy has some good predictions with one of them being almost a no-brainer, as the game feels almost too suited for the switch to not be on it.

UFO 50 port
Surprise final content release for animal crossing new horizons leading into switch 2 launch window animal crossing game
switch port of the animal crossing mobile game now that its complete
infinity nikki port

Cyberbuffalo

I’m thinking more with my wishlist than anything elese here, because nothing would please me more than a port of the remaining Zelda games that we are missing.

A new Amiibo announced
Windwaker / Twilight Princess HD Ports
Reduced Price Bundle with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Something Pokémon related, possibly a swing at the fences of selling more switches R/B/Y reveal
Another Yakuza announced

I like my list here but with Nintendo Directs, who knows?! The completionist in me really would love to have the final major Zelda games show up on this system because then, the switch would be THE ULTIMATE ZELDA MACHINE OF ALL TIME! I also think they could be throwing one last hail mary to intice new people to the platform by finally putting out Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, either as some kind of standalone package or maybe on the NSO (I’m reminded of those 2DS units at the end of that lifecycle). Most Pokémon stuff happens in their own presentations but THESE ARE PREDICTIONS! There are no rules here! The last thing I could see is a follow-up to the Yakuza announcement with other entries into the series! Make the switch a Yakuza machine.

A few other things discussed are the few Wii U games that haven been left by the wayside that don’t need the dual-screen setup to properly function. Of those games my personal hope would be to re-release Devil’s Third, a Nintendo published character action game that was not well received in America, but apparently did much better in Japan. Which leads me to wonder if this game ever really got a fair shake.

If I could lob a last minute hope against hope than the last thing I would love to see is a port of NieR: Replicant. Come, join your younger sibling and make your way onto Nintendo’s handheld, we would love to see you there. While your at it, repackage the mobile game and bring that along as well.

Whatever happens tomorrow, I hope that everyone watching has fun and we all get to see some cool games coming our way!

blog | My plan for reading more

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:01:14 -0700

I need to read more. I’ve never been much of a reader. In fact I can remember most times of my life when I was active in reading (and journaling, we’ll get to that), so at 40 to be able to pinpoint specific points in my life when I was actively pursuing literature and vehemently digesting it is probably a bad thing. I should read more. This blog was a way for me to disconnect from social media because I believe it can be inherently evil, even though it can be fun. So I taught myself how to code ,or taught myself how to search for answers. I deleted my twitter account, I don’t really instagram, I haven’t used Facebook since they added the tiered frienship system like 15 years ago. So now I’m going back in time and trying to fill those holes that I dug myself with more productive and enriching hobbies.

Enter, Comic Books!

A few years ago, if you’ve followed this blog even a little you’d have seen refer to 2022 as the Year of the Hack and Slash, a year in which I explored the character action genre of video games, in no particular order, trying to connect themes and influences while also getting better a genre that by the end, was cemented as my favorit. Why do I bring this up? Well the following year I was following up on a few threads and I was looking for information on the game Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden and the included miniature Dark Horse comic that came with it, and saw a discussion about “Hack/Slash”, the comic book. I was interested in it. I also saw that some of these were released on Image comics, the first comic book company that I read in the 90s (The Maxx is and was my all time favorite comic book). So I downloaded the first omnibus. And devoured it. I downloaded the second, and then the third and when I looked it up, I saw that there was a kickstarter for the definitive edition omnibus, number 3, and I stopped reading right then and there and backed that puppy. I became a fan of comic books again! It only took like 30 years.

Comics as a gateway

So now, a few years later I’m reading comic books fairly regularly. I have a comic shop that I like enough, I have weekly pulls. Hack/Slash is by Tim Seeley, he had another book come out called Local Man with artist Tony Fleecs, Tony Fleecs was making a follow-up to his book Stray Dogs called Feral and since I’m a cat AND horror nerd, that just fell right into place. This has been extremely fun, rediscovering comic books again. I’m not really a marvel/dc kind of comic reader, but I have started to read Rogue: Savage Lands by Tim Seely (in my youth Rogue and Gambit were my favorite X-Men).

This past January there were devastating wild-fires in both the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. I haven’t really blogged about this but it was really fucked up to see your city burn on two fronts, and now we know people who have lost everything. I did not have anything to say about it that others have not said better, so I kept it to myself mostly. I did write a draft blog post, but never published it because I don’t really think it added anything to the situation and it made me feel inadequate as a writer. Amongst the discussions about these disasters was talk of a book by Octavia Butler called “Parable of the Sower.” Catrena has been reading and listening to a lot of books since last year so we decided to read this together as a kind of book club. She got the audio book from the library and I found out they made a graphic novel adaptation. This felt right up my alley. I’ve been calling it my summer reading incentive, giving me a bridge between just reading comic books into literature while also not shocking my system. I have a hard time sticking with a book. I find my mind wandering, I don’t remember what I had just read, I can’t keep track of characters, I think this is me being mostly out of practice and also my social-media-addled endorphin seeking brain is constantly looking for that next post. I brought this up to a friend and he responded with:

“this is one of those books where however you can get it in your brain is a good plan of action”

I’ve read it, I liked the book, the graphic novel was well done and Catrena and I discussed it as we both progressed, which was fun, and I don’t really feel like I missed out on anything. I think the adaptation was extremely thorough with keeping true to the texts and it was so brazenly prescient in a lot of ways that it became scary. I’m glad I read it and I’m currently decided between waiting on the release of the sequel’s graphic novel adaptation or “graduating” myself and getting it from the library.

30 Days of Journaling

At the end of February I challenged myself to start journaling again. It’s been a few years since I’ve really taken it seriously and after cleaning out a desk drawer I found some unused notebooks I decided needed to get filled. I love notebooks and pre-pandemic I always had one with me wherever I went. Being stuck inside for 2 years, not traveling, I lost that habit. As I cleaned out a drawer in the living room desk to make room for Catrena’s scrapbooking supplies led me to declare “I’m going to start writing at night again.” So far, so good. I’ve missed two nights but I’ve made up for it by writing in the morning. “But this is a post about reading more” yeah I know there’s a point here, and it’s that I’d love to be a better “journaler.” I want to be more literary with the things I write, my journal, these blog posts, the game updates, my time with a camera and my thoughts about my galeries. I’m reading more blogs than ever, which is great, but I wanted to expand that. When i re-read my journals, I want to be entertained, I want to be challenged.

So now I have a short list of books I want to read, along with continuing up with the comic books. And I’m going to do it, at least that’s what anyone who is trying to make a change tells themselves. The first step to enacting change is telling yourself to do something. At least that’s the only way I can justify it. Here are some of the books I’m thinking of reading:

1. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I’ve had this book for years, it was the cool book to tote around in your early twenties. I’ve never really given it a second look so color me surprised when I find out this was one of the prime examples of Gonzo journalism, something generally associated with Hunter S. Thompson.

2. Travels with Charley

Written by Steinbeck this is a journal of his travels around the country with his dog Charley. I’ve startedt his book before but never finished it and I finally want to get to the end.

3. Hold Still: A Memori with Photographs

Sally Mann’s memoirs, illustrated with her photography. I had to sneak at least one photographers journal into this list though I hope its not the only one.

4. These Savage Shores

This is a graphic novel I found when poking around League of Comic Geeks. A retelling of Dracula mixed with Indian mythology and legends. Sounds like a really interesting mash-up and the art is great.

5. The Enormous Room

This is by ee cummings, a poet that was fairly influential on me in my youth. I’ve never read any of his long form work but this account of his imprisonment during WWI seems likea good place to start.

6. Communion: A True Story

I had said to a friend that I wanted to read at least one UFO book this year and this one happens to be a first-hand retelling of the authors supposed UFO encounter. A lot of what we know about ufology stems from this, including into popular culture like the x-files, this feelsl ike a no-brainer.

Lets do it!

This feels like a good list of things to start with. Nothing too hard, nothing out of the scope of a high school reading lass, which is where I feel like I need to regress to in order to build the habit. And I’m well on my way. I’ll give some updates periodically. I know a popular thing to do on small blogs these days is to keep a running journal of books read but I don’t think I want to do that. If letterboxd taught me anything its that I may not be a great reviewer. But in time, maybe we’ll get to that as well.

games | Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 22:28:19 -0700

Older Horn Blows

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. “Didn’t Monster Hunter Wilds just come out? Why are you playing a game that came out 8 years ago, practically to the day?” Well I can tell you its because I’m turning into a little goblin freak for Monster Hunter and want to scratch that itch on my brain until the title updates come out for Wilds. Plus, I’ve tried to mess around with this game on more than one occasion and I’ve never progressed too far. Speaking with some of my friends, it seems the same happened to them as we’re all about the same HR. So come with me on a journey to really dig into what may prove to be the swan song of the techincal and fiddly era of Monster Hunter games.

The last time I can figure I played this game with any enthusiasm beyond checking my HR, as far as I can tell, was September 21 2020. This may also be the first time I did any real damage on the game, though I did buy it from Amazon on November 22 2018. I know I messed around with it here and there but I’m going to stay with the September 2020 date as my start date. Today upon booting it up I was greeted with my character, Buffalo and his trusty Palico sidekick, Chuck (some things never change). Apparently I was a Sword & Shield user but I also dabbled with Long Sword, Dual Blades and Switch Axe. Now that I’m back I’ve gone full Switch Axe sicko and have started to work towards a blademaster armor build.

It’s funny to say I’ve “bounced off” a game that I have played for close to 27 hours, but with Monster Hunter they seem to tune these games for people to sink thousands of hours into. I’ve barely scratched the surface of this and looking through the games menus, I find it hard to believe that I’m HR3 and have 27 hours in. I feel like I have 30 or 40 in Wilds and I’m so much further beyond. There was a theory flying around social media that Wilds isn’t just easier, we’ve all gotten better at Monster Hunter and I do think there is something to that, especially as I go back to this title.

Mar 21, 2025 / 10:28 pm

Monster Hunter Rise is the most time I’ve spent with any game in the series, and to me, that game felt like it was more of the old-school model just with horses and spider-man abilities. Now that I’ve spent some time with Gen Ultimate with all of that and Wilds under my belt, I can really see the things that were left behind. But! No matter the systems that are replaced or tweaked or all together cut, the one thing that feels exactly the same is queuing up a quest and getting four sickos in line to blow that hunting horn to give a monster a good old parking lot beat-down.

It’s incredible to me that after 8 years this game is STILL extremely active, and not just with HR999 sickos. I setup a hub for HR1-50 and it was full in 2 minutes. Originally I was just expecting it to be me and Larry Butz but we got two more recruits immediately. One of those guys was not great! And three of us knew it so we queued up a quest and left him behind. Its the best way to send a passive aggressive message that you are taking too long or not pulling your weight (they left the hub during that hunt and by the time we returned, they had been replaced by another hunter).

I’m really enjoying this experience so far and I’m going to continue with it even though this pushes my BOMBS25 idea back further than I’d like, and Xenoblade Chronicles X just came out and is now sitting on my shelf with the rest of that series, staring me in the face. I told myself if X ever came to switch I would finally give it a shot, and for some reason my animal monkey brain had decided to collect them along the way … But old school monster hunter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ll leave you with a great video of me carting due to my palico Dahdrai, which is the quintessential Monster Hunter experience.

bleets | March 14, 2025

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:04:16 -0700

Man I’m having a … what’s the opposite of a love affair? Hate affair? I’m having a hate affair with Apple recently. The last thing they did I approved of was making the update M-chip macbook pros with HDMI out, no touchbar and SD card readers built in. That was the last good decision that company made.

The thing that’s currently pissing me off is there seems to be no way to completely turn off the safari URL bar autocomplete mess they’ve enabled. It’s such a disastrous feature that I’m considering running safari completely in private mode from now on. Say you’ve searched for something in the past. Say that thing was monster hunter wilds benchmark steam deck. This happened when they released the benchmark too and I wanted to confirm that this game would cause your steamdeck to explode and melt down into a tiny ball. Well guess what? Anytime you start to type “monster hu…” into the search bar, monster hunter wilds benchmark steam deck - google search is going to autocomplete. It’s insane! Hey. Have you ever gone to a specific website address on a website you may visit for more than one reason? Lets just say you’ve typed in CyberBuffalo.party/games into your browser URL bar once. now anytime you start typing CyberBuffalo and say you hit enter quickly, you’re headed straight to games, pal. And since they love hiding information behind veils of high design you won’t know that until whatever tld you were trying to reach loads.

It’s a load of horseshit that feels like it was invented specifically to compete with google autocomplete. And there is no way to turn it off without disrupting every form of autocomplete in macOS. Just another absolutely bone-headed decision to make. Look, make bad decisions all you want all day long, just fucking let me turn them off.

blog | lastmod shell scripts and sed

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:15:29 -0700

Wrapping Things Up

I never finished my write-up on making a new gallery / image plug-in and frankly I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say about it. I will say that I like the new plug-ins quite a bit. They’ve managed to simplify my workflow when making posts, especially in the games and bleets section. I made some updates to the way the CSS works which you can read about in the changelog.

I also made a pretty cool shell script that solves a very specific problem that isn’t even necessarily a problem, it was something that was working by design, but really didn’t work the way I had hoped.

Lastmod and YOU!

I’m treating a lot of posts in the game section like they are a thread on a social media site. It’s where I first fell in love with journaling about playing games and I wanted to try to recreate that experience here for myself. It’s one of the main reasons I decided to build this website from the ground up, because I really wanted to control the way it worked, tops to tails. When I make a post in games it generates a page bundle with an index.md inside of it. If I were to make another markdown file in that page bundle, it would be added to the completed HTML page and look like a follow-up post, a la classic twitter. Some of these games will be played over a week or two and never booted up again, but others I’m going to play for a while, such as monster hunter: wilds. And when I update that thread, how will anyone know? I added a “recently updated” section to the main page but it didn’t really work, it was just showing recently created, and not in the right order at that.

Enter lastmod. This is a command that you can preconfigure if you’d like to control the specific usage by adding some code to your config file (in my case, hugo.toml). I’ll get into the need for a shell script shortly here, but first to talk about lastmod a little more. What it does is returns the last modified date of any given page. In my hugo.toml file I placed the following parameters:

[frontmatter]
	lastmod =['lastmod', ':fileModTime']

This tells hugo that first we want to check for a lastmod date entry in the pages frontmatter, if that doesn’t exist just use the OS’s last modified file time/date. There is more here that will work with GIT but I’m not bothering with any of that noise. This seems pretty straightforward, using this I should be able to sort the pages by this last modified date and it should show which of these pages was updated last. Well, it doesn’t work on the resulting HTML files, its actually on the markdown files. Furthermore it doesn’t take into account page resources and when they were created. It all makes sense, but since I’m not editing the original file, the index.md of each page bundle, nothing worked like I wanted it. What I could do is go into each index file and edit something or make a change to the lastmod parameter by hand but where is the fun in that?

Enter The Shell Script

This is where my shells script comes in handy. Since I was going to write something to make my life easier, I really wanted it to do as much as possible. My criteria for this thing:

Create a new post in the current folder. If no posts exits, create post01.md. If there is a post#.md, create post#+1.md. If I’m in the god-of-war-3 folder and the last post in there is post04.md, then this script will start us off by making post05.md.
Add in the front matter to the new post file, since we aren’t using hugo’s built-in archetypes.
Needs to update the lastmod parameter in the parents index page.
Work in any folder on the terminal

I’m not great at shell scripting so I literally did what anyone would do, I started searching the internet for people asking for similar problems. The first was to figure out how to figure out if there is a post file in the directory and then to create the next one up the number chain. This post on ask ubuntu was practically perfect. It was well written, easy to understand and quickly adaptable to the task at hand. Here is what I ended up with:

#count your existing files
NUMBERATM=`find ./ -type f -name "post*" | wc -l`
#add +1 to create the next higher file
NUMBERATM=$((NUMBERATM+1))

#check if it's below 10 since you need the 0 infront of it
if [ $NUMBERATM -lt "10" ]; then
   var=0$NUMBERATM
else
   var=$NUMBERATM
fi

The next thing to do is to create the file using our variable as a filename. I had tried to use touch to make the file but I needed something that let you add multiple lines. It turns out cat does just that!

#get the date for frontmatter
newdate=$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")

cat > "post${var}.md" << END
+++
title = 'Post${var}'
date = $newdate
draft = true
+++
END

Also a little note about the newdate variable, this is formatting the date in a variable in a way that Hugo likes so I can use it both in the post front matter and the lastmod parameter in index. To do that last part we’re going to use SED! SED SED SED! I’ve never used Sed before but it’s a pretty powerful, old school method of text formatting and replacing. LUCKILY I found someone with a write-up about using it to edit front matter, but for different reasons. This was useful because it got me familiar with the syntax to do a search and replace. However it turns out that sed for macOS is the BSD version so I had to work backwards towards to the correct syntax and ended up with this:

sed -i '' "s/lastmod = .*/lastmod = ${newdate}-08:00/g" index.md

The important thing to remember is that this uses a swap file to archive changes and after -i you have to include what you want for the file extension which are the empty single quotes.

And it works! It works a treat! It makes the posts, updates the lastmod date and gives me a happy little message. Full code below!

#!/bin/zsh

#count your existing files
NUMBERATM=`find ./ -type f -name "post*" | wc -l`
#add +1 to create the next higher file
NUMBERATM=$((NUMBERATM+1))

#check if it's below 10 since you need the 0 infront of it
if [ $NUMBERATM -lt "10" ]; then
   var=0$NUMBERATM
else
   var=$NUMBERATM
fi

#create your file
#touch "post${var}.md"

#get the date for frontmatter
newdate=$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")

cat > "post${var}.md" << END
+++
title = 'Post${var}'
date = $newdate
draft = true
+++
END

echo ""post${var}.md" has been created!"

#sed voodoo to update the lastmod of index
sed -i '' "s/lastmod = .*/lastmod = ${newdate}-08:00/g" index.md

echo "lastmod in index.md has been updated!"

Oh lastly, in my home folder I made a new folder called /Scripts and moved this and quickbleet in and added them to zsh so they work anywhere!

bleets | March 12, 2025

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:01:53 -0700

I’ve started working on transitioning my professional portfolio site over to hugo and it’s turned out to be more challenging than I originally anticipated. Though I have made some progress in the last few days, I feel I need to step back and reevaluate my approach. Its interesting how in web development there are so many different paths that can take you to the same end result.

bleets | March 10, 2025

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:25:48 -0700

“Right to Repair” laws need to take into account the shuttering of the post office. 10-15$ to ship a 2$ part does not equate to being reasonable. I know a lot of companies using blanket shipping options but come on, this part for my espresso machine weight practically nothing and could be tossed into an envelope with a few stamps on it. It’s all part of the same scam. Make public shipping options too expensive, shutter small artists’ business, keep people from being able to fix their stuff, keep people tapped onto the suckling teet of the american capitalism machine blah blah blah.

bleets | March 09, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 13:17:09 -0700

Small but sizable earthquake today while hunting a tempered rathalos in monster hunter wilds was not the immersive experience I wanted.

bleets | March 08, 2025

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 12:11:02 -0800

Catrena’s watching Rupaul’s dragrace and I finally realized where I recognized Suzie Toots from.

bleets | March 05, 2025

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 08:55:09 -0800

Just a quick note to myself as I’m going to have to come back to this, but I’ve made some interesting improvements to the site over the past few days. First, I took that “quickbleet” automator script and turned into a shell script which actually works a lot better (it’s faster!). Secondly, since I wanted to be able to see a list of most recently updated games pages, I need a way to affect the lastmod property of the frontmatter. See, when checking the changed date at the OS level, it’s not checking the output html file, and it makes sense why it wouldn’t, almost every single index gets updated when you make a change (if you have a latest post or recent tags section, these are always updating). Since when I make a follow-up post for a game I’m writing about, the main index stays the same. So I wrote a ~~bash~~ ~~zsh~~ shell script that does a few things. First, it checks to see which post_#_.md exists. if none, it creates post01.md and add in the simple front matter that I want. Then, it sets the dateas a variable, uses sed to change the lastmod parameter in the front matter of that folders index.md. Nice and simple lol. I’ll share the code and resources when I write this up in a blog post.

bleets | March 02, 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 22:17:11 -0800

Hoo boy! 10:13pm earthquake, shook the whole building and gave us a little rumble. On the third floor of the loft it probably felt more intense than it was but that was a good shake for sure.3.9 out of North Hollywood (I guessed 3.8 near Pasadena)!

games | Monster Hunter Wilds

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 16:12:53 -0800

HORN BLOWS!!!

What a glorious day, the horn has blown, ushering in a new Monster Hunter title & I’ve signed on with the guild! I’m happy to be playing it at launch. A game like this can be more fun while surrounded by an excited community, and there may be no better online game community than Monster Hunter.

I’m probably about 14 hours in over the past 3 days and while I’m obviously enjoying Wilds, it does annoying stuff! Look, it’s called Monster Hunter not Monster Walk-and-talk. Walking-on-rails through a new locale, unable to stray from the path while 4 character rattle on about this-and-that, only to stop and deliver a monster to you gets old. And I’m not done with all of that yet, I have more of the story to get through and this is the formula they like to use. When the game cuts the seatbelts off and you get to do whatever you want, it’s really excellent.

There are some great new monsters, I’ll make a tier list of my favorites later on but Rompopolo should get a special shoutout for being extra disgusting. I’m going to keep updating this with thoughts as they come or some memories of great hunts. For now, please say hello to my hunter, Chazerito and his trusty palico Chuckeeto.

Chazerito as of March 2, 2025

Mar 3, 2025 / 11:52 am

… And that’s credits! Well the first credits, that is. I assume just like previous games the “post game” is really like 3 or 4 credit rolls deep. I’m happy to be in High Rank! I’m also happy to be in what feels like a new style of storytelling. The chatter has died down a little, Nato has grown up and isn’t quite as annoying, the lands are traversable and materials are ripe for the gather! It’s all Monster Hunter, baby and I’m ready to wild out.

Interestingly one thing the story did that I liked was begin to question the ethics of hunting monsters. So far, they’ve done a great job at not making me feel bad about killing these monsters. Some of them, like the big bear guy or the sleeping monkey guy or the frog man from the beginning of this game are literally just chillin" and i feel bad about rocking their shit. But arkveld? Get out of here. That angry electric lava great ape? fuck him. That disgusting mosquito balloon filled with oil? Say your prayers. While I’m not rushing to Monster Hunter for philosophical debate, its interesting to see.

Now, onward to the builds! I need my rapid morph, I want partbreaker and speed eating! I can’t wait to see the full extent of the post game gear! Happy Hunting!!!!!

Mar 6, 2025 / 8:28 am

I have been having a great time now that I’ve made it to high rank. I haven’t started the hunt for all of my armor skills yet, my cobbled together armor pieces have been protecting me great, though I just hunted a Tempered Rathian and it did cart me. I got my revenge though by cutting that freaks tail off. Just a quick hunt before I head to work today. Chazerito, Chuckeeto and Birdito Blanco, living the dream and having it all.

Mar 6, 2025 / 11:35 pm

I had a great hunt session with a new buddy, SlurpeeZombie. He was much higher level than I was but was gracious enough to slum it in low HR hunts. I still hadn’t updated my armor from LR, still rocking Chatacabra armor pieces, and tonight it finally started to fail me. I carted twice and decided it was time to dump some armor spheres into this build, just to get through the big Jin Dahaad fight.

The first time we failed, I had carted twice and a guy joined just as Jin Dahaad started to do his big power explosion move and our new entry ran right into it and died. The second time I just wasn’t paying attention and kept getting trapped in bad situations. After the armor boost we ended up getting a full party, one of the players had a custom message that popped up when they mounted the monster that read “I MISS SILKBINDS” which rules (and I agree with!). Towards the end of the fight, I was able to work that tail straight off and it fell down, dead. Really great hunt! And with that I’m in the next stage of the story and have reached HR32!

What A Happy Family!

Mar 13, 2025 / 3:23 pm

I’ve made it through HR69 (SAY NICE). I’ve mostly caught up to my friends who are also little demonic freeks about monster hunter (in a good way). I think we are all at the point where we are waiting for a few things. First, we all need armor spheres. Capcom knows this as they’ve added in a special event quest that rewards more armor spheres than normal.

My right hand has been cramping up so I’m going to take a little break from it, at least for a few days. I think I’m honestly at a good stopping point because the next title update will bring with it a new monster (Mizutsune!) and the much awaited end-game hub plus more challenging monsters. The hub BEST HAVE palicoes preparing food for me because that’s a big staple that is missing holding together this game.

bleets | March 02, 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 10:24:43 -0800

My god Apple Intelligence is such an embarrassing product for a company like Apple to be rolling out. Its never been more apparent that we are in this weird place with technology where no matter the product, no matter how bad it is, mediocrity will be pushed on the masses because some guy said so. Its such a dumb place we’re in right now and it really doesn’t feel like we’ll ever get out of it. Recently I was setting up a file for something I’m going to get to CNC’d and I to step back from it because the manual tracing and drawing I did made me question whether I think others will question if this was done by AI. I think this is the first time in my lifetime I truly feel that Pandora’s Box was opened. In other words, you can’t unfuck that pig.

bleets | March 01, 2025

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 23:04:50 -0800

One of the problems with building a website from scratch for yourself is that you spend a lot of time tinkering or fixing it as opposed to just making a fun post. Every time recently that I’ve went to make a post I stop because I’m in the middle of fixing the thing. BUT I can see the light at the end of that tunnel. I’m really getting a solid grasp on this thing and it’s working the way I want it to. I’m pretty happy about that. Now that I’ve got an okay grasp on Hugo, I need to start building a template for my professional website so I can get the fuck off wordpress.

blog | Making Sikil Pak

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:34:06 -0800

Today I decided to make sikil pak, which I had never heard of until Catrena and I were at a winery in Valle de Guadalupe last winter for her birthday. It’s delicious, think of a hummus that was made with pepitas and no tahini. Lots of great Central American flavors and seemingly a straightforward cook? I’ve been threatening to make it ever since. Tee up today, I cleaned and reorganized our spice counter and the place “to the right of the stove” which gets all oily and nasty and covered in coffee grounds and stuff and I just like ignore it until I do a day like today. I turned that motivation up (use it or lose it, right?) and did a few more things in the kitchen. There was a great deal on whole chickens at the store, $8! I haven’t seen a whole chicken for under 10$ in at least 2 years, they are normally like 4.99/lb making a whole chicken live around 14$ somewhere.

Spin Me Right Round

Spin, baby spin!

For the chicken, peppercorns, garlic cloves, dried rosemary, fresh time go into the mortar and pestel. I think I’m finally ready to buy a spice grinder. I find myself getting lazy with the m & p so things don’t end up as smooth or small as they could. I salted the skin and added the rub and into the rotisserie it went. Somewhere in the cooking process the chicken legs fell down, despite being tied. This caused the tips of the legs to be raw, while the rest of the chicken was reading 175°. For a second, I was like “cut the tips of the legs off, problem solved” but quickly realized if I flipped it upside down and cooked it for 10-15 min it should correct its course. Which I did. And it did. So that’s sitting in the warm oven until dinner (thinking of making blue cheese cauliflower rice and maybe a lemon chicken gravy out of the drippings to go with it).

Get to the point

This feels like one of those recipe website we all love to make fun of and I do understand the desire to write about food but sometimes you want them to get to the point, or at least have a way to get there quickly. Luckily for me (and you!), reading my ramblings in the main goal of this website and buddy, you’re in for a treat.

I continued cleaning and organizing, moving on to the snack section where I delightfully found a bunch of dried fruit I think we pilfered form a craft service site. As I was transferring dried cranberries to a jar, I realized we were rich with pumpkin seeds! I had 3 different containers filled with them (2 shelled, 1 shell-on) and Catrena dared me to “make [her] that dip we had in Mexico.” All I remembered about it was

We liked it
Hummus but make it pepitas

We even had to look through our camera rolls to find the photo of the menu. Had I been a more industrious food traveller I would have written this in my eating journal, but I’m not. So I didn’t. Anyway, I quickly looked it up, Sikil Pak, and found out its roasted tomatoes and pepitas and maybe some spicy peppers of some variety. That’s all I needed to see. I had some grape tomatoes that needed to be used as well as two small romas that were also on their way out. I also had a shallot in there and, because I organized my spice counter, found a bunch of chiles that Catrena’s cousin had given us on our last visit.

Roast it all

Everything ready to pop into the oven!

I put everything on a 1/4 sheet and through it in the oven at 500°. I knew it wasn’t going to be in long so I wanted to go fast and loose with it, get some color on things. After about 10 minutes, I turned the broiler on and left in another 5. Everything came out perfect. The shallots (sliced thing) were cooked, the tomatoes had some color and were juicing, so into the food processor they go! I started with the toasted pepitas until it had a breadcrumb texture then added everything else, drizzling in some olive oil until smooth. And holy shit was this spicy. Catrena and I like spicy food, especially when balanced well so the heat doesn’t overwhelm the flavor, but jesus christ neither of us could eat this haha.

What the fuss is all about

Unfortunately I didn’t have any sour cream or crema to add in, fat can curb the spiciness, give it some balance. What I DID have was cottage cheese. I think cottage cheese gets a bad wrap. Its creamy, salty, slightly sour, It’s pretty versatile and can be used in instances like this. I blended in a few spoon fulls and it was immediately beter. I continued to add little by little until I felt it would begin to overpower. It’s good and the cottage cheese definitely helped, but it’s still too spicy (haha). Will I make this again? Absolutely. I think I’ll be able to do it better especially if I’m not in the middle of reorganizing half of the kitchen. After all, I’m still flush with pepitas.

UPDATE

Went back in after some time in the fridge and it’s better cold! Plus, I made a batch of margaritas and that’s also helping. When in doubt, margarita!

blog | Making New Image Galleries

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 23:56:28 -0800

Lets do this

I can’t get this out of my head so I’ve started to knock away at making a new image gallery shortcode. yes, that means I have three image galleries now, yes I completely underestimated how many insane options you need to consider in the hopes of making this infinitely functional.

I’m going to keep some notes here so I can remember what it is I’m doing. After all, I’m not writing a tutorial because I barely know what I’m doing, besides there are other tutorials out there that will get you a lot further than this. You’ll see the changes I’ve made a long the way which could be helpful for you in the future.

To Start

The first thing I needed to do was figure out what kind of lightbox I wanted. Yes this was my first step because I love a lightbox (who doesn’t?), if I didn’t want that kind of functionality here I could have figured this out a long time ago. But that ease of use is fundamental to my enjoyment on the internet and I’m sure I am not the only one.

lightbox2 is pretty popular but it feels slow and possibly bloated. photoswipe is actually already included in one of the gallery modules on this site, I could have used that if, and this is a big huge if, I had thought about it like 4 hours ago.

Enter… SimpleLightbox! It’s incredibly light and efficient, looks nice and supports a wide range of options with plenty of parameters that can be tweaked. All of that sounds good, and it did’t look too complicated. I often find things like this have been engineered to solve 85 million different scenarios so they are big and bloated. POWERFUL! for sure, but for me too much.

I needed to figure out how to build the gallery. I always had a thought that you would just use hugo page resources to load all images into a map and then range through them, maybe using the built-in image resources to build a thumbnail at the same time. A bit of formatting and then you’d have some kind of gallery, boo-bam. But, it couldn’t possibly be that easy.

Well it turns out it’s basically that easy.

Christian Specht has an excellent tutorial that literally does just that. He uses lightbox2 which I also used at first, because I wanted to just see how the javascript and css was loaded. This is such a great skeleton for what I wanted to do. Also, this is just pure dumb luck, while looking around for ideas and tutorials I found this stackoverflow comment that laid out a pretty compelling idea for a responsive image gallery.

WE’VE GOT THE BONES!

The skeleton is coming together. With SimpleLightbox’s javascript & CSS files in place, I subbed them into my new shortcode, {{< newgallery >}} and nothing worked. I fiddled with it for a while and I realized that it was actually kind of working, at least the CSS was. I utlizing the script properly. In the examples on the website there is some sample code on what I was missing.

<script>
// using plain js
new SimpleLightbox({elements: '.imageGallery1 a'});
</script>

As you may have noticed, you need to assign a name to the gallery, really you are actually giving a unique name to the <div> that its sitting in and then telling the script. This is how you end up with your lightbox. Because the bleets section is going to be one large page (until I deal with pagination but lets ignore that for now), each of these image galleries needs to have a unique identifier. During testing it would start to freak out if you arrowed through one of the galleries on this big list of images. My thought was to use a random number and Hugo (go?) has a function built in for that, math.Rand. Originally I was just going to drop a random number here but theoretically you could end up with a collision, so to avoid that I’m taking the post’s date/time and using a function that is new to me, .UnixNano! This converts the time to the number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970. This should avoid collisions indefinitely!

The way that I’m targeting these random divs is by using another CSS Selector. they all start with <div class="imageGallery--[RANDOM NUMBER]"> The css:

[class^="imageGallery--"] { 
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  align-content: flex-start;
  justify-content: space-between;
}

Make it Pretty

Speaking of CSS, now that we have functionality, I wanted to address the visuals. I have rules setup in the shortcode, by counting the number of images {{ $image := (.Page.Resources.ByType "image") }}, i setup different arrangements.

A single image will be original aspect ratio and have a larger thumbnail
2 will be side-by-side and thumbnails will square/cropped
4 will be 2x2, square, cropped
3 will be 2 side-by-side and then the third centered below them.

This makes the section look so much better. I’m extremely pleased. So…

What’s left to do?

figuring out how to work the $image.Resize Fit/Fill/Resize etc
how the gallery css wasn’t working for images that weren’t square
how I want to have full sized images
from the advice of the hugo forums, I should change the behavior of this to look for images from first, page resources, second, parent page resources, and third, a specific filepath.

This last point I’m going to get into further in another post. Currently I’m not able to use this in the sub-posts of the games section because that is a whole other can of worms that I’m about to crack wide open. Thank you for reading!

bleets | February 20, 2025

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 22:09:40 -0800

HAVE I DONE IT?

This is me testing out a bunch of scenarios with this test bleet and a bunch of random images as I begin to test my very own image gallery shortcode. That’s right it’s time to ditch the 4 OTHER THEME PLUGINS I have going on this site with a nice, simple image gallery. I’ll do a big post on this later but here is my test tweet.

Okay so, I’m a selector slut now. With the way this flexbox CSS works, when you have one image, it justifies it to the left. SO nth-of-type() comes in.

.imageGallery1 a {
  flex-grow: 1;
  flex-basis: 125px;
  max-width: 300px;
  margin: 5px;
}

.imageGallery1 a:nth-of-type(1) {
	margin: auto;
}

It’s fucking awesome.

UPDATE - THE GALLERY IS WORKING! It’ll format 1, 2 or 4 images specifically, and then after that it will throw caution to the wind and let you dump a full gallery. I’m sure there will be more tweaks along the way but I will keep things updated in the changelog and blog.

Also did you know that Hugo automatically adds an id="" to your headings? This is how I was able to link to an anchor in the about page.

I am still debating if this is going to be rolled over into a larger gallery or if this is just going to be for the bleets page. After looking through the CSS of the the hugo easy gallery I think I’m going to pursue making a justified gallery in this shortcode. I think I can do it.

blog | Having Fun With Games

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:32:58 -0800

Back in the groove

I’ve been struggling with the site a little bit. I made this games section and there was a lot that I left hanging to just start to use the thing. I had sort of written about this before with the “Work it” post, and I had hope that writing was going to get me through it but my issues remained. The games section was up and running but it didn’t look great, especially on mobile. The date thing was flying around the smaller the screen got, the conceptual fake-twitter cards didn’t look great and the idea that these were posts written at different times really felt like it was getting lost. But I was using it, I logged a few games and I liked having a place where I could my games writing, no matter the quality or importance. After all, this is basically for me. It’s also for you, if you like it, and if you don’t it’s bean soup and you can leave.

A few days ago I finally started to take a look at the RSS feed Hugo is generating. I loaded it into NetNewsWire and sure enough, it worked! But it was sort of a mess. The default Hugo RSS built-in template is set to just output the summary as opposed to the whole content. That was an easy change, but as I started to get into this I realized that the way I was building some parts of this site are a minefield for RSS. The bleets section needs a complete overhaul, I’m not really using titles or front matter! Its just a date and some shitposts! Images are also just completely broken which brings me to my Hugo hiatus, it was brief but I had to walk away nonetheless. Reading about render hooks and all the struggles much more competent people have with getting images into Hugo were enough to send me over the edge. Then I realized that I’m basically using 2 plug-ins to display images which are all pulling them in differently and would more than likely all require some bespoke solutions to get working. So I did what any intrepid hacker would do, I closed it all down and quit! I said “fuck this” and played God of War: Ragnarok for a week straight.

I absolutely will figure out that out at some point but now is not the time. What it was time for was implementing a few new features and a bunch of fixes in games. So! What’s new??

The thing that I’m really proud of is the collapsible menu. The problem was due to the layout of the games sections, on mobile that ordered list of articles and titles was right at the top. So if you were to click on any of this, it would load and you’d never know it.

What to do?

I wanted to make that big list go away, but I didn’t want to use Javascript! So I turned to using a CSS trick which lets you use a checkbox to targe a neighboring <div> and using that on/off state with CSS selectors change things on the page.

.collapse {
}

.gamesmenu {
    max-height: 80px;
    position: relative;
    box-shadow: none;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}

.menucard {
}

.menucard label {
    text-align: center;
    font-family: 'Doto';
    color: #d62136;
    text-shadow: 2px 2px black;
    font-size: 40px;
    display: block;
    cursor: pointer;
}

/* Toggle Effect */

input#menu {
    display: none;
}

input:checked ~ .collapse {
    display: none;
}

The hardest part of this was getting it styled correctly and the real trick, and I hope this can help some weary-eyed amateur designer out there, the real trick is that your checkbox html cannot live in a closed div before the div you hope to change.

<div class="gameleftcolumn">
	<input type="checkbox" id="menu">
	
	<div class="sidecard">
		<label for="menu">Menu</label>
	</div>
	
	<div class="sidecard collapse">
		{{- partial "yeargames.html" . -}}
	</div>
	
	<div class="sidecard collapse">
		{{- partial "gamearticles.html" . -}}
	</div>
	
	<div class="sidecard collapse">
		{{- partial "gametags.html" . -}}
	</div>
</div>

It took me longer than I want to admit to learn that <input type="checkbox" id="menu"> could not live within the closed <div class="sidecard"> element if I wanted it to affect the neighboring sidecard/collapse element. I don’t know the science behind why, but just know that it doesn’t like it. I finally added a little bit of fun style by animating a plus sign that rotates when you click that menu, again all done with CSS. It’s an effective method that I think enchances the sites usability quite a bit.

EDIT: I forgot to mention there are plenty of tutorials out there that talk about how to do this but this is the one I found particularly helpful.

Bullets and icons!

While we’re talking about the lists, one thing that I had been thinking about doing since I started this section was to include some kind of bullet on the games list that would telegraph my progress on that particular game. I started to scour through discmaster for a cool bullet and eventually I found one I liked, a little glowing orb that was small. The list that this used to be was turned into a 3 column table. Hugo reads through the front-matter of game posts, I can set a param, progress, if its complete then it chooses a green orb. If it is set to inprogress it chooses the yellow orb.

It’s here where you go “Okay, cool, orbs and choices and progress, that’s fine, You build a table? For a list??” and to that I say “fuck yeah.” If it were just the bullet I’d have used the custom bullet as a background-image (which is what I’m doing in the table anyway) but since I am also setting this up to display a little icon to the right of the line, after too much css fiddling with positions and floats and whatnot, I decided to just build a table. and it works. And it’s responsive and looks great.

This works exactly the same as the orbs, parameters in front matter for whatever console. As of now I’ve pilfered a handful of icons from all over the internet to serve this purpose for now because, even as great as these are, I don’t think they server the intended purpose. They could be better. Readability is paramount for me, otherwise what’s the damn point of them? I also want them to have some degree of uniformity. I’ve opened affinity to poke around at this but I don’t know what they look like… yet.

What’s Changed?

The vertical date used on the games specific thread pages is gone. I’ve changed over to a new style using the <fieldset> and <legend>. This was one of those compromises that I’m very happy with. Originally I was so proud of myself that I got this cool vertical date in the gutter of a box shadow, but it was impossible (for me, anway) to get right on mobile. So I compromised, and ended up with a look and function that I’m happier with. There are some examples of using <fieldset> to place rotated text around a box, but they were for very specific fixed sizes. As my CSS skills improve maybe I’ll come back to this.

A comparison

In Conclusion…

I sit here thinking about how to punctuate this rambling diatribe about fumbling my way through CSS with the very gracious aid and ear of my Grand Vizier of HTML Rappy and I realize, I don’t really need one. I certainly don’t have one, I don’t have a point about all this except that I was excited for a victory, a small achievement that has boosted my confidence to get back into that code and continue to make this damn thing as usable as possible. Even though life outside of the internet continues to spiral out of control, I think its important to reach for the small things we can control. Even the most viscious rodeo bull has steady hands on the reins, even if its just for a brief moment.

bleets | February 16, 2025

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 18:34:28 -0800

I’ve been ignoring the galleries section even though I have like 4 or 5 rolls ready to upload. One of the rolls I have is from a camera that I haven’t photographed yet and I haven’t photographed it yet because I’m still trying to work out what those photos look like. I think maybe I’ll finally upload some of the photos from our engagement trip in November, it would be nice to get those up to share.

Okay fine I’ll do it. Instead of complaining more about Kratos, I’ll make a gallery of some of the engagement photos.

bleets | February 15, 2025

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:38:56 -0800

I’ve been trying out the Monster Hunter Wilds beta and look who showed up. He left Asgard long enough to take this guy down.

games | Monster Hunter Wilds Beta: Thoughts

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:39:30 -0800

I’ve managed to snag some time with all three beta tests for Monster Hunter Wilds. I really loved Monster Hunter Rise and played a fair bit of Generations Ultimate, but never dipped my toes into world. I was firmly in the “Monster Hunter needs to be handheld” camp when that was first out and since the Steam Deck came out and the lines between handhelds and consoles are blurring more and more, I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. Not that the deck can handle Wilds, apparently it cannot, but I could still remote play into it, possibly.

I am a Switch Axe user, I think it is one of the more interesting weapons and fun as hell to play once you get the hang of the general concept. I’ve played with other weapons; dual blades (hasn’t everyone?), sword and shield, long sword and most recently, heavy bow gun. My idea for this post is to give out feedback on the game from different perspectives. I kept feeling all kinds of different ways about it and I realized that it was because I’m playing it from different perspectives. So, here aer my thoughts on Monster Hunter Wilds…

… as a (Relative) Newbie to the MonHun Franchise

I’ve already given my history up top and two games that released 5 years apart that I have put over 400 hours into doesn’t really describe a newbie. but a lot of people in the franchise have been playing for YEARS. I’m not one of them so my perspective is mostly limited to the modern lineage of the games. So as someone who has heart lies with Rise/Sunbreak, I like it, but I’m not in love it. For a franchise that is known for confusing choices, the way Wilds is handling the multiplayer is baffling to me. You have link parties, environmental link parties, a tiny, cramped hub area with dozens of horny hunters running around dressed like the Joker, spamming stickers and emotes, all crowding around the spectacled quest lady. It’s chaos! I know the other services aren’t open yet and Alma + The Tent are the only things people are going after, but every lobby I’ve been in has been absolutely wild.

… as a Switch Axe sicko

So far, once I shook off the rust, I’ve been back in full swing with the switch axe. Since we have no wirebugs, I’ve been jumping off lots of ledges to get the jump on monsters. I find charging up the sword take more time than I’m used to. I love that you can jump onto the back of the monster and ride it while attacking with your knife before deciding to use your weapon finisher. There are some differences with how you enact the discharge grab move and I haven’t gotten that to work consistently yet, but I’m sure once the game releases and I practice more it’ll be second nature. But currently I’m still able to pull off some sick shit.

… as a MonHun Rise aficionado

I miss Palimutes now and forever. There is something so disconnecting letting your seikert birds run around on their own, the maps become blended together and don’t really feel like environments that you interact with, instead you just existence in them. The palamutes (and standing next to them, the wirebugs) were a great way to bridge the gap between the long haul map traversal of the old games, and a fresh modern way to get around quicker. The seikerts are the next evolution, they are the self driving car of this world. Where Rise all but eliminated the need for the numbered sections of the map, the seikerts feel like they eliminate the need for the map at all. This is obviously a dramatic overreaction, as its just a demo, but unless they make a big effort in making the environments more memorable I can’t see this changing much. I won’t really complain about the wirebugs not being included because that was never going to carry over.

… as an XBOX Series X user

So far the game has run great and I’m really happy not be dealing with PC settings to get it to run right. it looks good, runs pretty great (its a beta) and will be easy to play.

Quest Complete!

I’d never really cared about World. It looked really cinematic and dramatic to me. A big part of the allure of Monster Hunter to me is the goofiness and World looked like it pushed that aside for big cinema. I probably wasn’t giving it its fair due because all the hallmarks of the older games are there, just streamlined and tweaked for a modern age. The thing I’m really interested in seeing with the full release is if that tweaking went too far.

games | God of War: Ragnarok

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:47:48 -0800

Guess what? It’s time to play God of War: Ragnarok! For reasons I’ll explain later (as-in after it happens, when I’m allowed to talk about it) I’m going to start God of War: Ragnarok! I have played two other games in the series, the third and 2018’s semi-reboot. Both of these games are very polished yet I found there was something lacking. Often times I have not responded to the story or some of the more ltedious gameplay elements. but I’m confident this time will be different! This is the GoW game that gets me excited about the series! So stay tuned and join me as we experience RAGNAROK!!!

Feb 13, 2025 / 3:44 pm

Oh hey, Freya’s here! Oh and she’s pissed! I guess we did kill her son.

Oh come on, out of the gate this game is already pulling at the sympathy strings, Atreus gets to shephard his favorite wolf into death as Kratos balks about training.

Bye, boy

Hack and slash combat that uses R1 & R2 as heavy attacks takes a lot to get used to. Blocking makes sense in my mind to use the shoulder buttons for sweet combos I really feel the face buttons are better suited. Nevertheless it won’t take too long to get used to.

I don’t know why Kratos is so unwilling to take this deal, feels like he’s ready to just be an asshole again, for the story!

Going from Ninja Gaiden 2 Black to this is boss whiplash. The first boss fight with Thor had 3 health resets and fought over multiple landscapes. Narratively they wanted these fights to last a specific length so it doesn’t feel as meaningful to me, this is the kind of game that doesn’t really care hw much damage you are doing, the fight is going to take a specific amount of time because they have a narrative going on throughout.

It's Cinema!

At its core, now, God of War is a cinematic experience first, and then a game. That shouldn’t necessarily downplay those experiences because some of them are great (like when you die in Thor fight and its on the ‘Game Over’ screen, Thor says “oh no! We’re done when I say we’re done” and he brings you back to life).

So far I’m enjoying this game MORE than the previous entries. I took care of a few “favors” for Mimir and so far they were more fleshed out and interesting than the sidequest stuff in the first game. I’m also wondering if this is going to be a bit more linear than the previous game, as it seems like I’ll be able to exhaust this area, and then we’ll move on to the next. That would be a nice change of pace.

It sure is pretty so far

Feb 14, 2025 / 11:11 am

So far, the build I've been focusing on favors parries and elemental damage. I think the game really wants you to parry so I'm forcing myself to do it. I play enough character action games, I really should be practicing my parries more and this game doesn't give you strict combos, so this feels like a way to extend my combat enjoyment.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

Howdy Folks! Be sure to sell your shattered runes! They server no purpose other than money!

This game is feeling linear in a way that I like. But I have to play as Atreus for a section and I don’t like that. Boo! Don’t switch up my characters to make me do stealth missions. Just don’t do it!

Okay I was being presumptuous, Atreus has his own moves and combos and actually plays pretty well. I like his dodge that has him flying through the air with his bow readied and time slightly slowed down. Between this and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, maybe I’m starting to turn around on games that force character changes on you?

Sneaky, sneaky!

Feb 15, 2025 / 11:48 pm

David Cage controls, beyond QTE have infested this game No point to the “platforming” because there is never risk, its just cinema

Feb 16, 2025 / 10:55 am

Met Angrboda. Liked her, loved the way she fought, could play entire game about throwing intense colorful powder at enemies while dancing and singing. The walking around and talking while doing chores, while a staple of this extended series, get old fairly quick. Because you are still doing little fights here and there and running away from the conversation to solve a puzzle and open a chest. It feels disjointed. The game is trying to make every single conversation poignant and meaningful to the point where none of them are. Its hard to listen to Kratos talk about the death of his first wife and child, the moment is cheapened by hearing grunts, groans and screams because I am throwing my chains at bramble. This feature/mechanic/mainstay/whatever-you-want-to-call-it was starting to overstay its welcome before Ironwood, but now that I’m beyond that and trapsing around Vanaheim with Freya-Hawk, a woman intent on killing me, where every single thing said is intense and dramatic, it’s turning to comical, and I know that’s not what the creators were going for. This is yet again another big Playstation title that wishes it were a movie.

Feb 23, 2025 / 11:16 pm

As much as it seems like I’m complaining about this game, I am mostly enjoying myself. The last few days I’ve been cleaning up side-quests and exploring the new areas that have opened up. I do like running around the more open areas solving puzzles, fixing the crater and collecting treasure, but the combat is getting so bad that I think I just need to head to the finish line. I hate running into a dead-end gulley and spawning a random group of draugr or satyr and have them kick my ass over and over again. These medium level guys take so. many. hits. It’s frustrating! And the possible health drops are just that, a small drop in a rather large pool that very much needs filling.

Additional thoughts on Combat

Kratos has practically NO i-FRAMES! The dodge roll leaves you open for a hit, your special attacks, with big animations that take forever to perform, completely vulnerable! And you cannot cancel them. I often find, in especially tense situations, that I will be trying to dodge and then attack, but I’ll press both buttons triggering one of these moves and OOPSIE Kratos is dead!

Since the beginning I’ve been using the parry shield, and I’ve gotten pretty good with them too. But .. what’s the point? I was fighting the Hateful a the crater and he has a yellow move that if you parry, buddy your timing best be on point because you still have 3 more hits to parry direct in succession. A successful parry doesn’t mean a guard break, or a stagger, or a stun. A successful parry also doesn’t really give you an attack boost. So it’s almost never worth doing, at least in the situations I’ve found myself in. I should just be using that huge blocking shield and dodging attacks. There is no reward for a parry!

I’m now at the point where Atreus is heading back to Asgard to help Odin. We’ve killed Heimdall who – wait a minute, we need to talk about the Heimdall fight.

To Kill a Mocking God

The heimdall fight was TOO DAMNED EASY. This god that has never been touch, has never felt pain, that knows your attacks before you even make them, fell without killing me once. A pair of dreki is by far the harder. I think I understand this, though, since the story is paramount they want you to be able to get through it even on the balanced difficulty. The games that I’ve loved in my life have found a balance between challenging you and making that challenge feel meaningful to the game (Drakengard 3 ending E anyone?). So Heimdall, a god everyone is afraid of falls easy, because that’s not part of the challenge, that’s the story. The challenge is all the extra curricular stuff, the favors and sidequests that are optional. I wish they had made the story more cohesive with the fact that you are a damned god and heimdal is a damned god! But alas, here we are. Okay, on to Asgard to find a mask.

Feb 26, 2025 / 8:37 am

And that’s a wrap on God of War: Ragnarok!

Oh boy what an ending! No, sorry, you misunderstood me. Oh boy, what? An ending? WHAT HAPPENED? We spent a lot of time being worried about Ragnarok and being prepared for Ragnarok and then it was we are trying to prevent Ragnarok and then all of a sudden Ragnarok is a giant monster and we made him and he’s on our side. There is a lot of whiplash in the way this game tells a story. It purposefully keeps information away from the player but the reason for this is unknown to me.

Atreus trying to figure out where the story went

Ragnarok itself, the war, the end times, felt unerwhelming. I also don’t know why we made such a big deal out of needing Sutr to find the flaw in the wall, so much so we decided to disrupt an eternal’s entire existence, when Sindri could smack a tuning fork at it. Nothing seems hard in this game, unless you are fighting a berserker or something.
Odin being Tyr the entire time was genuinely shocking. The death of Brok even moreso. I understand Sindri’s reaction, but I also think it is well within his character to forgive “The Crew” for this misdeed. But maybe he’s turning into the big bad of the next game.
Atreus’ tendencies towards doing good and being good natured feels forced. Why is he so invested in Thor? Thrud and Sif turning on Odin was also so very convenient and out of spec. Not once was it hinted that Sif was unhappy with her lot.
We spent so much time talking about, researching and finding that mask and in the end he just broke it up and sent it away. What does it do? Who knows. Why was it there? Doesn’t matter, apparently. That, to me, was the by far the greatest let down. You cannot show me a cool, mysterious mask and not let a single person try it on.
Odin’s boss fight was good and it was fairly challenging. Though would have been a lot cooler if he put on a mythical mask and went insane, right?

SPECIAL SHOUTOUT! I just want to take the time right here to point out how great Richard Schiff was at playing Odin. He took the perception of Odin, the big, evil, monster you’ve heard all these terrible stories about and turned him into a pragmatic rich guy. I loved it and thought Schiff brought him to life wonderfully. Congratulations, Richard!

In the end, everything is just kind of fine. Asgard is gone, plummeting from the sky into Midgard (oops). And Freyr is dead for some reason (there was absolutely no reason he couldn’t have escaped). That leaves the prophecy, why is Kratos not dead? Why is Atreus not holding his lifeless corpse and screaming! Well it turns out there was one more Jotnar shrine conveniently placed near the war camp. Hidden from them, it shows something! And Loki is going on an adventure to do something. I legit don’t understand where he is going.

Tonight on Baldy & The Bear

DID I LIKE IT?

After 51 solid hours of gameplay, I obviously got enough out of this game to stick with it, but did I like it? Of course, I’m not playing this as a punishment. There is lots to like about this game. Its a big Hollywood of Games blockbuster with insanely beautiful vistas and soap opera drama. There is an addictive quality to some of the fights.

Even though your god status means fuck-all to some of these side bosses, it's still fun to unleash Kratos' wrath on a big swarm of enemies. I find the upgrade system to be much improved from the first game, but it still locks you in to specific builds by gatekeeping the 800 different currencies needed to upgrade your armor and weapon sets.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

Remember kids, crafting in games is just shopping with extra steps!

In the pantheon of great action games, there is obviously plenty of space for big meaty blockbusters. GOW, the modern games, have cleaned up some of Kratos’ unforgivable habits, traits and tendencies but in doing so, they’ve perhaps polished him too much. I don’t think I ever needed to see Kratos weep over uncertainty, but here we have a game where he’s done it multiple times. In bringing this game up to the standards of the Sony catalogue, I feel as though they’ve sacrificed some things that could have helped keep this game more action centric, as opposed to making sections big interactive movies. Kratos is compelling, as a character, and even though I was dragged into this kicking and screaming I’m leaving finally admitting that I am a fan of these. I just wish they would tone down the longing for something other than video games.

games | February 2025 State of Play Thoughts

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:31:11 -0800

What’s good on what’s coming?

I haven’t done a quote/unquote “live breakdown” of one of these direct marketing presentations yet and I’ve been itching to do a little bit of writing today so here we are. I like these presentations, I think its a good way to stay up to date on various gaming platforms and I like video games. So why wouldn’t I like to watch these? So! What’s good? What’s coming? What don’t I care about? Let’s go! (Also farting monkey!!!)

1. Monster Hunter Wilds!

I’m very excited about this, I’m very much Monster Hunter pilled from the switch and Rise. I got properly sherpa’d into the series and have become a huge addict for the switch axe. I’ve played both Betas and will play the third and final one coming up (this weekend maybe?) and do a little breakdown of my thoughts. This trailer looks great and I LOVE Mizutsune as a monster, I just feel like they were made to fight with the switch axe. Looking forward to this release though I’m not thrilled I only have a Series X to play it on because I want to be able to play with Catrena as well.

2. Shinobi: Art of Vengence

This seems great to me, I haven’t played a Shinobi game before but they are on my radar (I have the ps2 game sitting on my shelf just waiting). If this IS NOT a Metroidvania and is level based I’m really going to be sold.

3. Sonic Racing: CrossWorld

Sonic Racing! I bet this is really fun if you love Sonic the Hedgehog! Honestly I would play this if it was in front of me but I’m not going out of my for it. I had played Sonic Team Racing a few years back and it’s very fun. Interesting that this is in the PS direct.

4. Digimon Story: Time Stranger

IF I WERE DRINKING I WOULD HAVE SPIT OUT MY DRINK AS THEY JUMPSCARED US WITH THE DIGIMON REVEAL. Did digimon take place during a nuclear holocaust? I guess you’ll have to play this to find out lmao.

5. Lost Soul Aside

This one I’m really very interested in. Good blade based combat, perfect dodging and bosses with special attack patterns? It feels like we’re getting a DMC-like out of this China studio, UtiZeroGames. Definitely going to keep on eye on this, seems like its PC and Playstation only so I may miss this just like StellarBlade. The ending title card gives off some F2P vibes so I want to learn more, for sure.

6. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Yes, I’m so in, I’m so fucking down, but I have like 6 other Yakuza games I have to play before I can even think about this one. Unfortunately because it looks so fucking fun,.

7. Dave The Diver / Yakuza Cross-over

I don’t know anything about Dave the Diver except that it’s the drama surrounding whether or not its an indie game or not.

8. Splitgate 2 Alpha

CONFESSION! Splitgate was sort of responsible for me getting back into gaming. I had built a streaming PC for Catrena because she was getting into twitch, and some work colleagues convinced me to install SplitGate. That led to my friend giving me his old Xbox One and THEN I bought a Series X. So thank you, SplitGate! I fell off the horse but I am absolutely rooting for you here.

9. WWE2k25

The Island? Seem like there is going to be A LOT of in-game purchases. ::thumbs down/fart sound::

10. Borderlands 4

I cannot believe there is more than one Randy that works at Gearbox. AND that they decided to put them both on my TV. There are plenty of people happy about this, more power to them.

11. Split Fiction

I still haven’t played It Takes Two, Catrena’s wanted to but we haven’t gotten around to it. One of these winter weekends that we’re staying inside avoiding the flu or covid we’ll have to play it. Also obligatory “FUCK THE OSCARS!”

12. Directive 8020

Confession - I LOVE Supermassivegames games. Getting drunk and playing Until Dawn in a dark room full of friends was some of the most fun I’ve had gaming in my entire life. It’s amazing. Having the “choose your characters, pass the controller” multiplayer is such a great way to experience these adventure games. The thing in Space! I’m really into this, anything that can give me vibes of The Dig is immediately great.

13. Five Nights at Freddy’s: Mimick

I don’t know anything about Five Nights other than watching that terrible movie so this is not for me.

14. The Midnight Walk

Claymation FPS. This has a cool vibe but rings very hollow to me. I commend it when devs decide to go the claymation route but it often ends up with something that is not my cup of tea.

15. Darwin’s Paradox

I completely spaced out during this one, sorry!

16. Warriors Abyss

ROGUELITE WARRIORS GAME FUCK YES 16 BILLION BATTLE STATES FUCK YES AGAIN Launching today, need to check it out!

17. Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny

We got an extended look at the remaster and it seems great. It looks as faithful to the original as possible and it seems to retain all of the quirk, which is great. Looking forward to this one.

18. Onimusha 4

They kept the goofy! It’s serious and strong and just silly and I’m so excited that it looks good. Seeing the protagonist gode on the demons and then FLEE with his tail between his legs is all I need to see, this game is going to OWN. Seriously this trailer was great. It is a great balance of everything that makes Onimusha great. There is some interesting environmental interactions that I’m excited about, he lifted up a table for cover and then kicked it to clear enemies in front of him. They showed off a little bit of the combat but not too much. What they did show were some brutal finishers where enemies were split in twain and maybe a mid-boss with some heavy attacks and a dual saber attack. I hope Capcom brings the speed with some of the later weapons and techniques, you could really zoom around in previous games. Pretty thrilled about this.

19. Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater

I didn’t understand the monkey slapping his butt but apparently this is one of the original DLCs which has some of my friends excited that Konami may be finding their juice again. I don’t know anything about the Metal Gear series so I’ll leave any other observations to those with skin in the game.

20. Hell is Us

This is the game that continuously gets mistaken as Death Stranding 2. I think that has a lot to do with the intriguing characters as much as its dark world. This game could be interesting, it has some of the hallmarks of a good character action game but could also be secretly hiding the fact that it’s a souls-like. Which, I should clarify, is not really a bad thing, but those generally are not my cups of tea.

Here are some rapid fire announcements that I didn’t really care about.

Lies of P Overture DLC
Dreams of Another (“Weapons that create not destroy” sounds like a 30-Rock throw away joke)
Days Gone Remastered (LOL)
StellarBlade Nikke DLC (LOL what a pair)
Tides of Annihilation

It’s at this point that I’m feeling this presentation should be wrapping it up. Sony and Microsoft don’t know how to pace these things.

Metal Eden
Mindseye

21. SAROS (HOUSEMARQUE)

I had NOT played Returnal but heard good things about it. The style of this game along with the Indian overtones have me intrigued. It seems like they are sticking with the hostile shapeshifting environment and resurrection themes of Returnal which honestly, good for them.

That’s it! Some good Hack & Slash announcements, I feel like the veil of Souls-likes have been lifted enough that Platinum/DMC/Kamiya style games are being highlighted once again, which makes this little freak pretty happy. I think we’re going to end up with a PS5 sooner rather than later if they keep investing in small studios that are making weird character action games. I just wish they would make them smaller!

bleets | February 11, 2025

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 17:04:36 -0800

IT LOOKS LIKE I’M A DOT PARTY GUY AFTER ALL! WELCOME IN THE DAWNING OF A NEW AGE. THAT NEW AGE IS CYBERBUFFALO.PARTY

bleets | February 10, 2025

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:19:41 -0800

We had a rough day today and while sitting in an urgent care, I wanted to share something I had written and realized that after the last round of typography updates (of which I’m really not happy with) my site looks like butts on mobile.

Blog - I need to overhaul the headings and fonts (some of them just runoff the page) Games - it’s completely broken on mobile. I fucked with it a bit tonight just to make sure it’s baseline readable Bleets - Basically fine but I don’t really love the layout. I want it to feel more like a timeline and also more micro. about/changelog is fine.

I tried hacking away at it today but I’m not feeling confident in my ability to scab the CSS together to get it to where I’m happy with it. blah.

games | Bowser's Fury

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:54:20 -0800

Last Week for Catrena’s birthday we decided to FINALLY go to Universal Studios Hollywood to see the now 2-years-old Super Nintendo World! As a Nintendo person, it was very cool and the interactivity and games available to play with the band were very fun (the ride is another story, surprisingly). Since then I’d been itching for some mario game action and with a cold winter day after a week of rainy work, today felt like the perfect day to indulge. It turns out I’ve got quite the backlog of Mario games! I recently unearthed my copy of Mario 3D World so I decided to tackle Bowser’s Fury!

Right away it’s clear that this isn’t exactly following the formula of the 3D mario game. It’s changing things up a little by giving you a glimpse at what a true, open world Mario game could look like. At one point I realized that it has a bit of that Breath of the Wild magic to it. You climb up a lighthouse and you can look off around the sea to investigate what else is out there. You see an island in the distance and can just go there if you want! Mario finds himself in a sea of islands, each having a name a set number of Cat Shine Sprites to find. You can leave the islands at any time but when you set foot on that land, it will pop up and tell you the clue name of the next sprite to find.

Along with the openness, another thing that feels like BotW to me is the titular mechanic, Bowser’s Fury! He rises up out of the murky depths and is so angry, he’s furious! He’s throwing rocks and breathing fire, he’s mad! It can add a great deal of tension to an otherwise straight forward run at a cat shine shard. It reminds me of the Blood Moon cycle. My problem with this comes later in the experience when the frequency ramps up and you don’t have a moments peace. I know what it’s doing, it’s pushing you to go to the Giant Cat Bells which brings me to the best part… GIANT CAT MARIO KAIJU BATTLES!

I don’t know if it’s happened before now, but has Nintendo ever made a kaiju game before? I’m not going to look this up right now and just assume this is a first for them, and honestly it’s such a great fit. Giant Bowser stomping around this land that looks just like a little Katamari level and huge Neko-Mario using a small but effective bag of tricks to stomp his ass back into the sludge from whence he came. It’s really quite fun and I’m surprised they used this mechanic for this small game! I have a feeling that the next 3d mario game will borrow heavily from some of what is going on here.

After the credits rolled today I was greeted with this: 50/100 Cat Shine Sprites found. Only half! I was surprised that it was that low. At a certain point Bowser never settles back down so you sort of HAVE to go after him, which finishes the game. I am going to go back in and try to get more sprites, though, I want to see what some of the tougher challenges are.

Feb 9, 2025 / 9:32 am

I’m happy I jumped back into this game post credits, because there are full on islands that I hadn’t even stepped foot on. And I was right, this is all the most challenging stuff. Lots of platforming, lava, spinning fireballs, a.k.a. the good shit.

Feb 9, 2025 / 6:20 pm

… And that’s a wrap on Bowser’s Fury! Honestly this could be one of my favorite 3D mario games I’ve played and yes the fact that everything is cat themed has something to do with it. The world they’ve built, the islands that transform for one challenge to the next are an excellent evolution of the 3D Mario Series. Instead of restarting the levels or returning to a hub area after you collect your prize, the game just plops you down where you finished for you to do whatever you’d like next. You could jump out to sea where Plessie is most likely waiting for you (if not they likely aren’t too far) or head to the start and see what the island has in store for you next.

My biggest complaint is that towards the end, Bowser is just constantly pursuing you. If you’ve cleared the credits once then Bowser will sink back into the water if you grab a sprite or die. It can make some of the harder cat shines even more difficult to grab. The last 20 or so challenges were a good mix between difficult Mario platforming and clever puzzles. One island has you skating an obstacle course in an ice skate. It took me 50 tries to get this stupid shine, I could not control that damned ice skate. Bowser’s freaking out every third run or so prolonged my success as well.

Conclusion

I think a lot of people maybe overlooked this game, after all it was a pack-in with a re-released Wii U that had already sold well. I know I didn’t really give it a second look. I hope that this lack of chatter does not affect Nintendo from pursuing this as a full fledged 3D Mario game. Now that I’ve written that sentence, it doesn’t really make sense because this WAS a full fledged 3D Mario game. Just because I ploughed through the thing in 2 days doesn’t mean this wasn’t a complete experience. Could there have been more islands? Sure. Could there have been extra cat sprites? Of course, but 100 challenges spread across 1/2 dozen full islands plus countless little ones was actually very satisfying. Plus, it’s all cat themed! And we love cats here.

UPDATE - February 13 2025

HEY WAIT ONE HOT MINUTE. WHY THE CRAP WAS BOWSER SO ANGRY! I really thought there was going to be a reveal where he had eaten something really spicy (fire flower) and that all the black sludge we were cleaning up due to a stomach ache. There was a moment where we saw his aching, glowing belly and he definitely puked out that black sludge a few times. But there was no reveal! No conclusion. Come on Nintendo, where are my big story elements?!

blog | Decentralize Your life!

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:59:30 -0800

Fuck the corporate internet

Every day I’m finding more small blogs that are skipping the large platforms, moving away from social media, saying “vaya con Dios” to the internet that has been sold to us ad nauseum since the arrival of WEB 2.0! The hope is this is a rising movement, and people will purposefully abandon these capitalist institutions and build their own small conclaves on the internet. That’s what I’m doing, or I guess that’s what I’ve done! The one hitch in my giddyup so far is relying on Neocities to host this site because at any moment, Neocities could go away! They could also milkshake duck themselves into oblivion just like Substack has done! They could also be purchased by hitler 2.0 (or is that 3.0 now, post innauguration?) and you wouldn’t want to be caught dead with associating with their platforms.

So what options does that leave us with? Or rather not us which is the roll up your sleeves and re-learn HTML & CSS and learn about static websites and how to build them? Well unfortunately, it’s more grim than ever out there and that’s why I feel like we all may be screwed.

You Could Build Your Own Website

This is a great idea and something that can be fun and very rewarding. If you are reading this and want to get started there are lots of resources on Neocities and the world wide web that will help you get started.

The biggest problem is where to put it? Websites cost time and money and a lot of the options for websites are bad! I made the mistake a few years ago of signing up for hostgator as my professional website (run on wordpress) and it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made! They offer bad support and will not offer any solutions besides the upcharge? Want to hide your who-is information? 14.99 per year and no sweat. Want to make sure your wordpress doesn’t implode every fortnight? Pay 3.99 per month for systemic backups! Has the service left your site open to vulnerabilities that caused malware to infect it (probably not!)? Well don’t worry, for 14.99 a month their crack cybersecurity task force will fix it for you. It’s nonsense. Pretty soon you’re paying a mortgage to host a website on a terrible service. That’s not what the general public is going to want to do so they can post cat photos and complain about the internet.

These problems aren’t relegated to hostgator. If you look around there plenty of horror stories and problems with all available webhosts. And this is before getting into the myriad of A.I. assistants and website builders or whatever else that is being shoved in. Whoever said “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” was talking about hosting.

You Could Use a blog service

There are lots of blog services out there! Neocities is one and I do really like them even though I didn’t love their AI protection response. Nekoweb is another geocities-like that seems to have a great service with competitive pricing and a great free tier. You could also use something more all-inclusive like BearBlog! There are lots of awesome websites being hosted on bear.blog and I like the creators’ ~~mission statement~~ manifesto, though as we all know you cannot necessarily trust the altruism of one person to stay satiated forever! And the long term viability of these should be questioned as well. Geocities didn’t survive the corporate buyouts, blogger has been owned by google since 2003 so that could disappear at any second. Even without their shitty speedrun into ruining internet search and adding AI into everything in the worst way, they killed off inbox and I will literally never forgive them. This offers a “What’s the fucking point” dilemma to a lot of people! And I get it! I don’t really know what the solution to this is because it’s a big problem.

A personal website is a lonely, lonely place

I spend a lot of time practicing writing and reviewing cameras and sharing analog photographs and I have no idea if anyone is visiting or seeing any of this. Even now I’m going to write this thing up and I’ll have no idea if anyone can even reach this. Comments on websites are a tough value proposition. Who moderates those? What kind of authentication does it take to even post it? Do people really need to sign up for another service just to leave a comment on a blog they rarely visit? Static websites don’t really have a lot of comment options. Even a simple “like” or “i read this” button would add a layer of complexity, or at the very least a service you need to sign up for and maintain. Lastly with the way the internet works, even keeping an email address on your website for anyone to see can open you up to spam and other scams! It sucks out there!

Who knows?!

I don’t know what the solution is but I’m happy I’ve endeavored on taking on this blog. I’m hoping in years to come the process can become a little easier for people, and for more people to take up the mantle to make internet what they hope it can be as opposed to just taking what is given to us. Send me an email if you agree or disagree with any of this. cyb3rbuffalo on gmail !

SEE! I can’t even put my email out there!!

bleets | February 05, 2025

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 22:02:50 -0800

Apparently XBOX made a change and the console will automatically delete screenshots saved locally after reportedly 21 days, and screenshots uploaded to the xbox network will be deleted after 90 days. This feels like a change to force people to buy into the One Drive ecosystem. I lost a lot of screenshots and I’m pretty upset about it!

blog | Work it. Don't Let It Work You

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 11:54:17 -0800

Hot off the heels of an extended birthday for Catrena, we’re both tired (need a vacation from our vacation) and unmotivated (work is for jerks). I’ve gotten back into Ninja Gaiden 2 Black which is great, but I’m playing it remotely on the steamdeck and my xbox one controller does not have a screenshot button, which is a bummer because I love screenshotting games when I play (especially over-the-top cinematic games like NG2B). I had been working so much on the games section that I had stopped playing them, which is what the entire point of that blog is. At some point I started to let the boat stear me instead of the other way around. At a certain point I cannot let this website overtake my free time because just like most creative projects you could tinker it to death and back 1000 times. A friend (who is currently developing a certified dank website right now) said:

You’ve got a working site and a reliable content stream - playing with shit to see how changes feel to you is really all you need to be doing.

And he’s right! Tinker away, but use the goddamn thing and see what you need to add, organically. Right now it functions! I’ve got a great gallery section setup for sharing analog photos agnostic of a digital ecosystem. I’ve got a microblog (complete with stupid applet made in automator). The games section is up and running, supports micro-blogging and tracking completed games by year as well as long form articles and section-specific taxonomy. I’ve got a kick-ass camera database (that is woefully waiting for an update) that keeps track of which galleries were shot with which camera (that right there is the fucking juice). And an about/changelog that I continue to remember to update! That changelog maybe too long at this point but who cares, lets let it ride.

So all in all, I’m going to keep using this site, I’m going to keep updating the sections with content and as I see it, as I neeeeeed it, I’ll keep tinkering on the back end. As my old boss used to say “You’ve got to keep the ship going” and I plan on doing just that.

While also talking to my friend I realized that I had completely forgot about the cyberbuffalo tip. he assured me forgetting about a cool thing you've coded for your website is 'extremely swaggy' so I figured I should use it not lose it.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

hey kids! don't forget about the shortcodes you've made!

bleets | February 04, 2025

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:55:59 -0800

There was a Capcom presentation today that featured some news about Onimusha 4, and just like the Xbox presentation when they announced Ninja Gaiden 4, they also announced an Onimusha 2 remaster! Pretty excited to play through this and see just how off the rails the series starts to go. Based on the character Gogandantess, I’m guessing pretty its pretty whacky.

games | WHAT TO PLAY NEXT: 2025 EDITION

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:51:26 -0800

back on my bullshit

A few years ago I decided to exclusively play Hack and Slash games. Bayonetta 3 was coming out, I had loved the first one on Xbox 360 and since Nintendo had decided to resurrect that IP from the clutches of obscurity, it slowly became a favorite of mine. I guess Bayonetta was the original gateway drug for me! I had played some other classics in my years of gaming but Bayonetta was the one that really dug her heels in.

After the year of the hack & slash (YotHS), I continued to play games that were related to auteurs and studios that I admired. In 2024 I wanted to do the same thing but accumulated a wrist injury that really set me back.

Since then I’ve learned to love a theme. Or at least some kind of connecting thread to guide my hand from game to game. It gives me something to review, comparisons to make, rabbit holes to burrow into all cozy like. So I’ve decided that this year I’m getting BACK ON MY BULLSHIT and I made a graphical list of games that I’m ready to tackle! And god damn is it some dank shit.

I cheated and this was started in December of 2024 but for all practical purposes this is going to be known as BACK ON MY BULLSHIT 2025, or BOMBS25. Let’s take a look at the games!

Row 1

Drakengard (With the NieR series my all-time favs and having beat D3’s infamous ending I have to play these finally)
Drakengard 2
Blood+ One Night Kiss (This and SC:S are Suda51 games I’ve yet to play)
Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (I liked the art style of this, despite not having loved NG. Plus this is an outcast of the series and that’s my bread and butter.)

Row 2

Wet (The action in this game looks really unique)
Bullet Witch (Guns and witches, where have I heard that before?)
Binary Domain
Onimusha 3: Demon Night (With a new Onimusha on the way I need to play the insane 3rd entry and go trapse around France with Jean Reno.)
Dead to Rights (Added this after adding Max Payne 1&2)

Row 3

P.N. 03 (I’ve been fascinated by the Capcom 5 for a long time and have always wanted to play this.)
God Hand
Bloodrayne 2: Revamped (I played the 1st and liked it & now more than ever we need to kill nazis for sport)
Gravity Rush
Gravity Rush 2 (The art style alone sold me on these PS Vita gems)

Row 4

Samurai Western
Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman (I consider this the real deal first proto “hack & slash”)
X-Blades
Maken X (I started this on Dreamcast and really didn’t interface with the character swapping enough so I want to start again.)
Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death (6 hour long action game? Sign me up)

Row 5

Heavenly Sword (PS3 Hack & Slash)
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Devil May Cry 4 (Need to keep going on the DMC series!)
Remember Me (French character action witha weird memory remix mechanic)
DmC: Devil May Cry (Another entry in a series that’s been cast out by fans)

Row 6

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Vanquish (A Platinumgames title I’ve yet to play)
Max Payne (I want to play more Remedy games and figured I should start here!)
Otogi: Myth of Demons (FromSoftware’s OG Xbox character action game with 2 entries!)
Muramasa: Demon Blad (Will probably play this on the Wii)

Row 7

The Bouncer (Squeenix Beat-em-up, I think?)
Dark Cloud 2 (I’ve messed around with this and it’s a tech marvel on the PS2)
Policenauts (After playing Snatcher I’ve need to expand my Kojima knowledge)
Yakuza 4 Remastered I’m playing through the Yakuza series (slowly) with friend of the channel, Rappy in our gameclub.
Tokyo Jungle (dank ass ps3 game)

Row 8

The Last Guardian (See below)
Flower, Sun and Rain (I need my DS, a notebook and a copy of the Lospass guide)
Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates (This weird ass PC game still has a following to this day)
Giants: Citizen Kabuto (Weird game about giant guys, perfect!)
Elemental Gimmick Gear (I need to finish this, Dreamcast Zelda-like that has an incredible art style)

Row 9

Sunset Overdrive (Xbox weirdness)
Slitterhead (A dank ass game that came out in 2024)
Chibi-Robo! (I’ve never played this!)
Jet Force Gemini (I was more excited about this when I thought it was co-op, just like everyone)

What a list of games! Mostly these were added after conversations or some reminder of their existence. Since I’m only human and I started this in December, and it is currently January of 2025, I’ve finished two games and started (and abandoned) one other. The first game I played was a French game by developer, Don’t Nod called Remember Me. I had done a quick write-up on this over on bluesky which I’ll port over here at some point. Generally when I do a writeup for a game on ~~twitter~~ bluesky, I’m adapting a longer piece that I then frantically chop up to make it fit the character limit. Sometimes those longer pieces get sacrificed in the process.

The second game I played was The Last Guardian. Back at the Game ~~advertisements~~ Awards in December, a brand new Ueda game was announced which was the thing that really kicked off the resurgence of gaming for me. I played through both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus before I had made this list. So here’s where we’re at:

Just like a lot of these threads I’ll continue to update this throughout the year!

bleets | January 30, 2025

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 10:36:22 -0800

I saw this morning that they are bringing back The Pebble! I had a pebble smart watch for a while and really loved it. When they shuttered the official app I stopped using it and it is currently occupying space in a box full of kitbash parts. Really excited to see what they are going to do with it!

Announcement on Eric Migicovsky’s Blog

Official Re-Pebble Website

games | Ninja Gaiden 2 Black

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:15:36 -0800

NINJA GAIDEN TWO IS BACK IN BLACK! That’s right, the game so many consider a masterpiece has been remastered by the folks at Team Ninja and shadowdropped on digital storefronts everywhere. Hot off the heals of the announcement that Ninja Gaiden is SUPER back, at the Xbox Direct rip-off they also teased a Ninja Gaiden 4. What better time to jump back into the series that made me quit with anger than amidst a windfall of character action games.

A few years ago (during my experiment, the Year of the Hack & Slash) I had quit Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I found the enemies relentless, I hated the alternate character levels and I felt there was too much backtracking and not enough health. I actually did go back and reloaded my save from that July, I think I’m under leveled for where I found myself. I want to pick up a copy of Ninja Gaiden Black, which is backwards compatible on the Series X, and give that a go. It deserves a fair shake and given my history with the genre I feel more than qualified to complete it.

With my curiosity about Sigma satiated it was time to dive head first into the remaster and so far, I’ve found it excellent. Right away the game does an excellent job tacking the fundamentals to the board for you to remember, and has some great in-game devices to help reinforce them. I love coming across a body with a cheeky note about how they wished they could master some technique! If only they had taken their training more seriously they wouldn’t have died! It’s effective! Currently I’m in the midst of a water level that has not been terribly annoying. I’ll update this as I continue through the game!

The Title Screen for Ninja Gaiden 2 Black

Jan 29, 2025 / 9:09 am

I’m now up through Chapter 7 of this game and so far the low points have been the bosses. In Chapter 6, The Aqua Capital, you are traversing through a Venetian city. Big set pieces adorned with classical Italian architecture, canals complete with gondolas, and that ever important staple of Italian history, werewolves! Eventually the tall buildings stop and you end up in the cisterns below the city. These wet tunnels are home to a such an annoying, nuisance of an enemy, the infamous ghost/skeletal piranha. These little bastard will latch on and drag you under the water. They don’t do a lot of damage but are there just to cause trouble (the devs must have gotten a kick out of sicking these things on players because they use them in booby-trapped chests in later levels). So you make your way through these tunnels, you get past the ghost piranhas and end up in this HUGE room full of columns, pedestals, stairs and water. I swam around this place for 20 minutes just exploring all the nooks and crannies, I only found one crystal skull but there were a number of chests. And that’s kind of it! It was this huge room that was just waiting for me to kill a few floating fish in order to trigger a cut scene. What should appear but a HUGE water dragon! To my disappointment, you get locked to this small piece of floating rubble, you can move left to right and a step forward or backwards, but thats it. The dragon attacks you head on and will occasionally throw some ice, fish or water at you. Terribly disappointing to have this entire arena to fight in and you get locked to a square. This entire boss felt like ONE phase of Bayonetta’s huge bosses. I was hoping for a phase shift or to break away from the locked camera but after a few minutes, I had chipped away enough damage to finish it off and the chapter ended.

Don't call her an ice dragon.

The next chapter starts you in the same place but parts of the room have crumbled! Basically you can wall jump up to a second story area. Five minutes into this you end up fighting ANOTHER boss, which starts out cool in theory but you can kind of spam the same attack to take it down quickly. A giant bone boss should be fun! But I feel like these bosses are designed to look cool but don’t really offer an acrobatic Ninja a lot of openings to use their best moves. May of the bosses can be chipped away at with the bow and then you just have to slash wildly, hoping you come into contact with whatever part of them is the weak point (the bone boss had a giant glowing orb in his ribcage but you did damage by hitting its head or ankles).

Gogmagog, what a mouthful

The biggest disappointment so far is the King of the Lycanthropes, a 4-armed monster whom Goro would cower to, challenges you to a fight in the Coliseum! So you chase him there and ‘Finally!’ I’m thinking, ‘a one-on-one boss battle.’ In an earlier chapter you fight Genshin (one of the main antagonists) and he’s a warrior so it’s a tense battle of blocking and dodging.

'MY KINGDOM FOR A ARM OR TWO!'

This lycanthrope was dead quick! Because we got trapped against the ropes and he was doing very little damage but all my attacks were landing. It was a disappointment. I had more strategic fights against a strong werewolf enemy outside the castle. However, this fight did end in literally the coolest way, you grab the bosses giant sickle as the crowd swarms in and attacks. You get to fend them off for a little while until the carnage is interrupted by your big bosomed savior in a hover jet. She picks you up and you literally ride off into the sunset, just incredible work all around.

Sonia shows up at the right time, everytime.

Jan 30, 2025 / 10:08 pm

Oh hey, Rachel’s here. Hey Rachel.

hi i'm rachel :-)

This game can be totally ridiculous. My problem with introducing new characters to play as is they will undoubtedly have a level full of enemies that you’ll have to get used to, and then they will throw a boss or two at you. Rachel is very fun to play as but it tends to ruin your flow, you have to get into a whole new mindset. And while the moves aren’t that different from character to character in this game, their movement style seems to be. Rachel is a hammer user. She’s a little slower to attack and not as swift to dodge or even to activate the block. But for the most part, I was not nearly as annoyed to see her coming in this game vs. the original.

Feb 6, 2025 / 8:56 pm

It’s official, I like this game. We’ve been fairly busy the past week so I hadn’t as much time to devote as I’d like, but I dug back in yesterday and today and really enjoyed the levels I played through. I finally got to Ayane’s level and she plays great. Again, who would have thought that this game would be as horny as it is. Chapter 14 had a great section where you are running up a big staircase and lots of Ninjas keep flooding down towards you. When you get to the top you’re greeted with a cutscene where you get to learn a lot more about Elizabet.

The cutscene when she transforms from mostly naked Elizabet, Ruler of Blood is really quick but her character design rules. A hollow torso held together by a gross twisted spine.

This design is so sick

She was one of my favorite boss fights so far. Even though she flies (why do all the bosses fly?) you can dodge her and hit her with a combo. Not insanely difficult but it was a good fight. The next section of the game was cool, too. Going back through the torched village, fighting old bosses again and making your way to the base of Mt. Fuji to enter into the realm of the dead, but Genshin isn’t making this easy. It’s time for the next showdown.

Fighting Genshin in a field full of fallen Samurai Swords and molten lava felt straight out of a Kurosawa film (or at the very least Revenge of the Sith). This was a great boss fight too, though once you got his attack timing down it became fairly trivial. I died twice due to not paying attention to my health (they were being stingy with the heals up to this fight) but the third time I only ended up getting hit once.

I must be nearing the end! I feel like the next time I pick up the controller I’ll be getting close to coming head-to-head with the archfiend!

Feb 8, 2025 / 6:49 pm

… AND THAT’S CREDITS! The last few chapters of this game get BONKERS and I’m incredibly happy to report they ramp up the difficulty. I finished this last night and took me a few hours to get through some of the repeat bosses. All of our favorites make a comeback; King of the Lycanthropes, The Booby Butterfly Lady, the Hot Lightning Adonis. Its a boss-rush pantheon and seeing as though we’ve traversed into the land of the dead, somehow, at somepoint, it makes sense they are back!

These boss fights were much more challenging. In fact these the swarms of enemies, including these strange, shapely legged, double headed robot ladies caused me to switch up my tactics considerably. If I get swarmed by a group of humanoids I would choose the Kusari-Gama. This doesn’t rank high on the list of best weapons but I was able to memorize some combos that would easily take out a group of 5 or more. If I was dealing with large monsters, Enma’s Fang would be my choice. There are some aerial combos that get you above the crowd and let you deal some heavy damage.

But as you move through the story, your Dragon Sword gets one final upgrade (The TRUE DRAGON SWORD!) PLUS you can dual wield it with … THE SWORD OF THE ARCHFIEND! That’s right, you get two sword upgrades! Certainly whatever is waiting at the end of these disgusting levels could ONLY be killed with my magic power swords, right? Can you guess where this is going?

To me, if you spend all this time setting up the importance of these swords, and the entire lineage of the Dragon Clan has relied on the power of the one true Dragon Sword to keep evil at bay, why would you center the boss battle around THE BOW AND ARROW?! A weapon that is largely powerless? At this point I just assume that they wanted to make these battles as far away from Zelda-type 8-hits and done as possible. The saving grace here is that the Arch-Fiend is fucking awesome, straight out of a Gwar video.

It’s a tedious fight that goes:

shoot head with arrow
shoot belly with arrow
find new chasm in wall and wall-jump up towards the fleeing archfiend

Luckily there is a second part to this fight that makes the Arch-Fiend more of one-on-one opponent. Even though I’m being hypercritical of the ending, it was pretty great. There’s lots of impressive set pieces and action, the pacing is great moving from one boss or waves of enemies after another, it was extremely cool. The coolest thing I think is the very end, Ryu kneels in that same field of fallen samurai swords to pray, stand up and starts a slow motion walk across the field. Boom, credits. The credits keep rolling and end with him across the field where it resumes normal speed and hits us with one last cut-scene.

For all of the misgivings the boss battles bring, it really is a great game. Those negatives are far from deal breakers and are mostly there because otherwise it would be all gloating about how sick the weapons and combat system are. I liked the depth of the bench of enemies as well. It’s a game that makes me want to play the others in the series, or at least go back to the first and give it another shake.

bleets | January 26, 2025

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 15:24:39 -0800

Okay, I’m definitely making a games section. I’ve started to play Ninja Gaiden 2 Black after it was shadowdropped during the Xbox showcase a few day ago. During the Year of the Hack & Slash I had started to play Ninja Gaiden Sigma, which is Ninja Gaiden 1 (not black) upgraded for PS3 (played on Series X) but got stonewalled because I didn’t know what I was doing. This time around I’ve been more careful, a little more meticulous and more thoughtful with how I’m playing and having an absolute grand ole time. Looking forward to whatever they have in store for Ninja Gaiden 4!

blog | CBI Updates for January

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:06:07 -0800

website updates for january

I’ve been a busy beaver this month, lots of updates for the website. Depending on how you look at it the biggest update could be the addition of a new section, bleets! It’s a new section where I can just fire off whatever thought is pecking at my brain. Shorter than a blog post, but since I’m not on a platform I can make up my own rules and they can be however long I want. Don’t worry I won’t abuse it.

New Fonts!

I’ve also included an embedded web-font, the intrepid Doto. The way I’m using it, I feel it really adds to the overall art direction of the site, that idea that I touched on briefly in this blog post. There will undoubtedly be some wrinkles that need to be massaged out as I find different headings that don’t look right, or some overspray but I am confident I’ll get them ironed out. I’ve also updated the way text is displayed on the page.

bleets | January 23, 2025

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:47:08 -0800

NEW TIM SEELEY! NEW ASH WILLIAMS! This is going to be my first introduction to Red Sonja, a comic I’ve seen in the back of every comic I’ve ever read. Always intriguing, but I’ve never imbibed.

April 2025, pretty excited!

bleets | January 22, 2025

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:15:22 -0800

I need to come up with a way to photograph the camera collection that isn’t just put on the desk in my wallpapered living room, something more aesthetically fitting for the rest of the site. A few years before the pandemic I had to sell off a part of my collection and the way I photographed them might be the ticket. Reclaimed wood surface, but instead of the white wall behind it, I’m thinking of making a background, maybe a pixelated gradient of some type. Hmmmm…

blog | Neocities and Ai

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:39:53 -0800

Is no policy better than a bad policy?

Today Neocities decided to roll out their AI policy which amounts to an open sourced robots.txt, file now included with every subsequent new website. Anyone who had been using neocities as a web host with any seriousness up to now has undoubtedly made one of these, as well as thrown the necessary (and most likely ignored) meta tags in the heading of their static websites. It’s one of the first things I researched when getting a website set up. When I looked it up six months ago, the basic unfortunate reality of robots.txt is most scrapers will kindly choose to ignore them. This isn’t a binding agreement between you and the robots that scour the internet looking for content. That content being anything robots scrape for, not just AI. They look for email addresses, keywords for SEO (search engine optimization), pictures to ingest into their image generation bot, text for their chatbot, etc. It’s a never ending problem and they’ve been around as long as the internet.

But this response from Neocities, who is my webhost (and yours if you had accepted their offer of making the old web, new again), is a white flag! Oh no! We cannot possible aid you in protecting your websites from these (admittedly) nefarious circumstances. I am not extremely technical, this website is the most code I’ve ever written in my life and it’s been a wild ride! I do not know how to appropriately tackle the problem of billion dollar AI companies coming to your websites to harvest your data. However, I could do some research and possibly consult with the many people who have written extensively about this topic. This is their business! And they are promising a better web for the close-to-1,000,000 websites they now host.

I don’t think Neocities is alone in this conundrum. “AI” as the industry and world at large has decided to call it, is being shoehorned into literally everything we see. And the more they use it, the more they force it into the most day-to-day areas, the more scraping that will happen. I think that I just want more than a head-in-the-sand approach to this issue. Can we stand up as a group and say “no more?” There is a program called pi-hole that uses blacklists that are sourced from multiple organizations. It is interesting to envision a crowdsourced blacklist of AI bot ip addresses in the same way. I think there needs to be a pool of people that aren’t beholden to AI in the way that so many are, and these pools need to use that amazing ingenuity that so often happens on the internet to stand against this nonsense and protect all of our shit! Or we just lean into it and poison that well, and poison it big time.

bleets | January 20, 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 21:25:04 -0800

Okay so what was that previous bleet about? I wanted to be able to quickly pound out one of these microposts so I worked with macOS’ Automator to make it happen.

Even though I’ve been a mac user since GW was in office, I’ve never really dipped my toes into automator. Part of this was to just get a working automator app as practice.

What does it do?

The first thing I did was add a shell script:

#!/bin/zsh

# Change to the CBI Hugo Folder
cd ~/Websites/cyberbuff/

# get date/time for folder name
cdt=$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%S")

# run hugo to make new faketweet
/opt/homebrew/bin/./hugo new content faketweet/$cdt

# open new md file
open -a TextEdit content/faketweet/$cdt/index.md

# wait for textedit to close
wait

# move to new folder
cd content/faketweet/$cdt/images

cwd=$(pwd)
echo "$cwd"

Next, I pass that $cwd variable down into automator. The script opens the newly created bleet in text edit and opens a finder window where you can select images. Save the .md file, quit, select any images if you want them and hit choose. Then, the script copies the images into the page bundle image folder, runs hugo to generate the site and pushes it to neocities. The big holdup is that it takes a few minutes to fully publish the site. Maybe’ll I’ll turn hugo into a chronjob or something of the like and just push it out every few hours. Still thinking, but a nice tinker!

bleets | January 20, 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 21:17:11 -0800

Hooray! The quickBleet.app automator script is working!

bleets | January 20, 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:04:05 -0800

Today, on this day, is the stupidest possible day for everyone the world over.

blog | 5 Questions Challenge

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 23:59:11 -0800

While browsing around the web I stumbled onto a group of blogs that seem to be updated pretty regularly. This is exciting! The blogs are coming back, nature is healing! One recurring post I keep seeing is this ‘5 question challenge’, and even though it was started by users on the bearblog platform it has since been adapted and made more generic for any platform.

Onto the questions!

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Besides the random blogs started and abandoned going back to the late 90s, I started to think seriously about doing this in 2020. I had decided to build a cyberdeck and enter it into a contest hosted by cyberdeck.cafe. I needed a place to put build logs and project files. That website lasted about a year before the server it was on shuttered. Then in 2024 I had started to get back into analog photography and wanted a platform agnostic way to share photos. iCloud is fine for people in the apple ecosystem, but what if I want to send someone a gallery that uses windows and an android phone? What if I didn’t want to use google photos? I decided to put together a photo gallery website for myself. With the galleries quickly sorted, I started to make this into a place where I could write reviews on cameras and list their features. The camera database was born! And out of that, hoping to one day write longer reviews and do photo essay I made sure there was a blog section. It also helps as a pseudo wiki, a place where I can remind myself and write out how I accomplished certain things on the web. While I’ve been dabbling with html for most of my life, I am by no means a coder. I’m scraping by here! So having a place I can write out what I did and how is useful, especially when life gets in the way and I spend time away from the site.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

In 2020 someone recommended Hugo as a quick way to build a website and it really is. I love the platform. For me, one of my big requirements was a quick and easy to use photo gallery. I also wanted something static without a lot of overhead and absolutely no tracking. I build this entire theme from scratch, believe it or not. I found a really kick-ass tutorial that was aimed at getting a barebones theme up and running quickly, and from there I was able to suss out everything else (absolutely no chatGPT or AI was used to make this)! I am also hosting this on neocities, I love their mission and have since moved on from the free tier to be a supporter. I imagine eventually the site will become big enough that I may have to move, but for now it’s excellent.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have a wordpress site for my business, but it’s just being used as a portfolio. I’ve used wordpress a lot in the past, but never to really run a consistently updated blog. I hate wordpress haha and would never want to use for something recreational. Way way way back in the day (like pre y2k) a friend of mine got me some hosting on a really cool website. My subdomain website ran on a php-based, homespun blog platform. Lastly, during the pandemic I decided to use twitter (rip) as a place to post my thoughts and micro-reviews about video games. That’s pretty much been my history with blogging. This period is the most consistent I’ve been blogging in my life.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Hugo uses markdown files to generate pages so after I create the post files in terminal, I use bbedit to write. I like bbedit, but I liked textwrangler more (come on, the lasso icon?? no contest). Sometimes i’ll start a blog post and leave it open in bbedit for days as I’m working through it. I also continue to use this like a personal journal, or a way to get some feelings out without posting. You know how they say the act of writing an angry email can be cathartic without sending it? It’s the same with posting.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Recently, I’ve been writing after bigger life events or when I’m trying to digest something, like the passing of David Lynch. I’ve also been trying to put some low stakes posts together and tutorials, because if I can make this a part of my life, if I can make a habit out of it, than I will stick with it longer. The more I give to this blog, the more I can personally get out of it.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I touched on this briefly, but I will sit on drafts for days. I actually still have a draft about the recent LA Fires that I haven’t posted. Again, sometimes just the act of writing it is cathartic itself. But also sometimes the posts are hollow.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Oh what a question, how do you choose?! All of these posts came from me, and in some way they are all equally important. I think the first post is my favorite because its semi-autobiographical, technical, funny and historical. It’s really the perfect origin story of this blog and helped me define the tone I use to talk about changes and developments to the blog itself. I know it sounds like a cop-out but my blog is relatively new so I don’t have a lot to choose from. My second favorite is the post announcing that neocities filename character limit broke the galleries and I used a gif of Chris Elliot in Cabin Boy to illustrate that.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I just went through a redesign AND added a new feature! I just finished building the microblog section, bleets, a feature I had wanted to implement for a little while. I think what’s coming next is going to be a personal video game review section. I love video games and I like to do short reviews on them and I’ve been thinking of a way to incorporate that into my site. There are some dank game sites out there so I have some research to do. Another thing I need to do before all that is finish fixing the opengraph previews and get a proper RSS feed working.

Thanks for reading this, I hope if you stumble across this and decide to add these questions to your blog you’ll let me know! You can find me on bluesky or feel free to send me an email, which is cyb3rbuffalo on gmail.

bleets | January 18, 2025

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:18:42 -0800

…. And that’s a wrap! It’s tweeting time! I’m happy with this. Let’s fucking rock baby, doll.

bleets | January 18, 2025

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:14:20 -0800

HOOO-BOY! I think we’re going get this sucker to operate. I am going to keep the styling minimal, but toss in a little blue as an ode to twitter we’ve all lost. RIP.

bleets | January 18, 2025

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:12:16 -0700

Alright the galleries are DEFINITELY WORKING now. Getting these stupid toots to post with the galleries that are created in their .md file was kind of a pain in the ass, and it took me making them all leaf bundles. But cool, it’s working. The layout still needs work. Here’s a couple of images from my desktop.

galleries | My Big Mini Is Broke

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:48:35 -0800

OH NO!

I’ve had this roll in my backlog to upload for a while. I think it confirms my suspicions that there is something wrong with. While speaking with the owner of a development lab I use, he told me he’s never seen one of these in working order. Looking around the internet seems to confirm that while the feature set on these cameras is often good, and the packages themselves attractive, they are riddled with issues that seem to stem from a fragile flex cable. So… I bought one. There are a bunch of these on ebay for a whole host of konica big mini models and I grabbed one for my model. I will do a blog post when I decide to put that together. Until then, take a look a select few images from this bizarre roll of film. At the very least, there are some cool experimental images here, and also some nice textures to use as layers. Also next time I shoot this I will use a brand new roll of film and leave the expired film at home.

blog | David Lynch Is Dead!!

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 10:59:06 -0800

RIP 1946 - 2025

I think most creatives have a story or three about the influence David Lynch had over them. I remember the first time I watched Twin Peaks, it was at this weird guy Corey’s house in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston. We had all of Twin Peaks taped off some TV station, I think it could have been AMC or TCM. They featured introductions by the Log Lady, something that has since become standard on all the home video releases. At that point there were some barebones VHS releases, but nothing definitive. We had 3 dozen donuts, multiple coffee pots and a few bottles of Southern Comfort (something I never really drank again after this weekend). And we watched it all! All of it straight through the weekend, including Fire Walk with Me. And it ws fucking awesome. Just an incredible way to watch this TV event, this monumental trick on the American public (and the world at large, eventually). I told my parents what I was doing that weekend and they groaned! “BE PREPARED TO BE DISAPPOINTED” they moaned. “We still don’t know who Killed Laura Palmer!”

It’s easy to understand why so many are upset at his passing. In a world full of artificial enthusiasm and corporate art, it’s especially rare to find someone who practiced their craft with every ounce of authenticity they had, and to live life the same way. We should all be so genuine. And to live life so full. You want to know the measure of a man, look at the friends they’ve carried for decades. He had collaborators in spades. We should all be so lucky.

I’m particularly upset because he was denied his final works. The bizzness stopped looking at Lynch as marketable after he finished Twin Peaks: The Return. To deny a master craftsman their last opportunity to bestow their gift on the world is a crime against humanity, and should be punished. Yet that punishment will never come, because their is no justice in this world.

Godspeed, Let’s rock.

blog | January Link Dump

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 18:04:13 -0800

It’s been a minute since I did link dump. I’ve been keeping a bunch of links around just to add to one of these. Originally I told myself I’d it once a month but like, come on. So currently, today, January 12th, we’re a few days into the devastating wild fires in Los Angeles and I’ve got some links to put here. Some will be related to the fires but a lot of them won’t be. I did read see that Brandon Sheffield is in the early stages of putting together an awesome itch.io charity bundle.

So when that is launched I’ll be sure to post that around. Now on to the links!

Mutual Aid Network Los Angeles

Incredible collection of resources for mutual aid in the LA area.

Cyberpunk Project

Longstanding database of cyberpunk works.

Anti-Ricidivism Coalition

Working to end mass incarceration, I found this group because they will help donate money directly to the incarcerated fire fighters who are being drastically underpaid.

Cyberdeck Cafe

Great website devoted to sharing information about building cyberdecks. Lots of cool builds to be seen (including my TTSD-3085)!

Creeping Net's World

Love the layout of this site. Lots of great info on classic computers and video games.

Azhdarchid

Personal blog of Bruno Dias, a writer and video game designer. Love their writing style.

Monovektor

Cool website that hasn't been updated in a while. Lots of sick design inspiration.

Houdini

Website of Erik Houdini. Lots of cool stuff to look at including a virtual zine rack as well as a constant display of internet time.

A Visual Ode to blank VHS tapes

Fast Company posted a bunch of scans of blank VHS tapes for design research.

subcompact cameras

Easily one of the best sources of subcompact cameras on the internet. Unfortunately one of the sister sites is down, 135compact.com. oddcameras.com appears to still be working.

Renga in Blue

Truly inspiring website, where Jason Dyer will 'endeavor to play and write about every adventure game ever made.' And they are doing it chronologically! Love the layout, lots of great info on old adventure games.

Public Domain Image Archive

A handpicked collection of images in the public domain. Really great stuff here.

Kirkland's Manual Labor

Huge archive of scans of manuals and disc images for retro consoles including PS2.

galleries | Halloween, voting day and beyond

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:49:21 -0800

Here are some more images from my excellent Olympus XA. I wish I took more notes about this, including the film, but it was an expired roll and I decided I wanted to test out the flash attachment. I’m going to do a longer post about this at some point but the flash has a few options. You set the speed of film you want, or you can just set it to full blast. I believe this was 400 speed film but since it was expired, I set the flash to 100 because I thought it would need the extra exposure boost. I think it was successful! The film here, though, is expired expired. So take a look at our travels through Halloween, Voting Day and a hotel stay late in the fall of ‘24.

blog | Adios, Bobbin Threadbare

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:22:36 -0800

The dawn of a new age begins!

We’ve been trapped inside for a few days due to the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfire apocalypse. It’s not going great here, I’ll be honest! People will text or call to check in and my response should be “yes I’m safe but I live in LA and I’m very sad!” but I usually just give them an update. But I’m not here to talk about that!

No, today I’m here to usher in a new era for this blog because as I’ve been sheltered inside due to toxic smoke, I’ve spent some of that time tinkering with this website and decided to give it a proper makeover. While I’m not officially ready to launch the ~~new theme and color scheme~~ (oops I lied), I am ready to say goodbye to a very old friend, Mr. Bobbin Threadbare.

My man!

Loom was not the first adventure game I played, that honor would go to, if my memory is correct, 1982’s Robin Hood Adventure for the Apple II. I believe it wasn’t even the first LucasArts game I had played, but it was the first I played alone, by myself, all the way through the end. It was my home alone after school game for a spell and it really stuck with me. Trying to describe it to my friends and family after I beat it felt like I had live through a fever dream. Even though it wasn’t truly finished, I love it and still think it’s one of the best adventure games every created, A REAL WORK OF ART! So naturally when building this website i decided that any blog without a featured image would default to Bobbin Threadbare.

For a time, it was all I needed. But as I started to develop more of a personality for the iconography here, he started to feel more and more out of place.

See what I mean? Well this serves as a fond farewell to the man, the myth, the legend, the default blog icon, Mr. Bobbin Threadbare. So long, old friend! May we meet again as swans flying past the fabric of time.

For the new icon I wanted something that matched the direction I had started with the featured images for things like link dumps, recipes, media posts and tutorials. All of this kind of lives outside of the camera database and photo gallery. I’m still considering making those pages have a different style all together but I’m not quite ready for that. These icons were all inspired from some of the graphic design in Suda51’s No More Heroes 3. This is on the top of my favorite games of all time lists so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. There is a great use of pixelation and gradients and I wanted to borrow from that.

This is reminding me that the featured images are all different sizes, I need to export them all out so they are consistent, especially since everything is now held within the asset folder of hugo. BRB. Okay that’s done! These were all over the place in terms of size and I’ve got them down much smaller. They should all start to load faster, which is a goal of mine.

The next thing I’m going to do is change the color scheme. I know, I know, you’re RIOTING out there, “don’t change it!” “you’re a monster!” “we love the blue!” AND I HEAR YOU but I think it’s time. I like the brick background I found but I want to use an asset I made myself, which is a frame of 35mm that wasn’t exposed and it has some sick ass grain. It will be better to transition to a darker color scheme, anyway I think. Maybe I’ll leave the option, for all you diehards out there… maybe not.

Also I’m changing the logo to something more cool k thx bye

blog | 5 Things I Loved from 2024

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:29:58 -0800

Let’s Make a List

I’ve been thinking about the end of the year and while most people do their lists and wrap-ups starting the beginning of December, I like to do my reflection in January. As I was reading another blog I came across a post that I really liked. and thanks to them, I’m 100% going to rip off this incredibly simple and fun format.

1. Backpack Battles

I had never really played a game like Backpack Battles before. I’m not really a rogue/lite player, and I don’t play a lot of games you’d need a mouse for. But when my brother-in-law had me a play a round of this game I was immediately hooked. It’s incredibly fun, funny and addictive. It’s been a constant for over the course of the year, especially as I dealt with de quervain’s tenosynovitis in my left hand. Having this game to fall back onto was just wonderful. I was even able to get this running on my macbook pro thanks to some plucky redditors and porting kit.

2. Feral

In 2025 I found myself getting knee deep into comic books again, something that I hadn’t really explored seriously since the 90s. I went from stumbling onto the book Hack & Slash in 2023 to having a dozen books on a pull list at my local store. One of those books is FERAL! Tony Fleecs, Tone Rodriguez and Trish Forstner team up again to write an awesome horror book that has that looks like the Aristocats and spooks like Return of the Living Dead. I’m a horror guy and a cat guy and while my baby boys will never get put through this horrific zombies as a metaphor for rabies, I enjoy seeing a horror book that revolves around my favorite little domesticated buddies. PLUS! PLUS! They keep doing all these amazing alternative covers that take classic horror films and redraw them with CATS! It’s awesome. And I’m really enjoying the story and the art and the cats!

3. Girls5Eav

Originally launched as a Peacock exclusive, Netflix graciously picked up this show after the second season underperformed. Ashamedly I had not heard of it until the third season launched. If you are a fan of 30 Rock, I would recommend this show whole heartedly. As someone who LOVED 30 Rock but was (graciously) luke-warm towards Kimmy Schmidt, this was the follow-up I had been waiting for. Sara Bareilles is EXCELLENT, really understanding how to fall in line with the timing and delivery of a Liz Lemon-like character. And while the rest of the cast is also great, Paula Pell and the episodes centered around telling her story gave me some of the hardest and deepest laughs of the entire series. And as much as I hate to beg corporations to continue to produce great art, maybe if enough people watch the third season Netflix will give us a fourth!

4. Lisa Frankenstein

I know a lot of people really didn’t like Lisa Frankenstein, but I thought it was great. It’s a Sunday afternoon spine-tingling experience, a great romantic Halloween movie. A film that felt as though everyone involved was cool in a that people are cool without even trying. More ‘Heathers’ than expected, in a good way, and retained the same charm of films like ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ without feeling intentionally campy. Just well made, well acted and fun to watch.

5. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

I’ve written about this game a little before but I think it is such a cool thing to have come out in 2024. Half TRPG, half RTS, all character action. There is lots of praise in the right channels for this game, often written by sickos with a giant backlog of PS2 and OG Xbox games, by people who yearn for the glory days of Team Ninja, by intrepid folk who just want to see sick, combo-based character action seemlessly melded with troop-based strategy games set against a backdrop of Shinto mysticism with kick-ass demon designs! Alright that’s enough, I’m panting with fervor. I think the best part of the game, from my simple perspective, beyond all that hyperbole I just baited you with is the skeuomorphism of the upgrade menu and OSD. It’s very neat, please give this game a try (it will scratch the itch until the new Onimusha comes out)

Special Mention - Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered

the SotD remaster came out this year and I really loved it. Since it’s a given that I would love anything that grasshopper releases, this is going in the special mentions section. I’ve played through it once, and started a secondary play through but am going to wait until the special edition releases (yes I bought that giant LRG johnson).

galleries | Las Vegas on Arista 400

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 13:46:14 -0800

November 16th and 17th of 2024 was Fallout Day in Goodpsrings, NV. Catrena and I are both fans of the series, and also fans of events like Renaissance Fairs so this felt like the perfect cross section of our interests. We decided to spend one night out in Vegas on Fremont Street where we stayed in one of the oldest hotel rooms in the city. El Cortez Hotel & Casino offered a great room with decent light so we were able to shoot some photos on my Fujifilm XT-3. We were also able to get some decent shots on this Arista 400 edu DX that I had loaded into the Olympus Accura. I had never shot this before but for 8 bucks, DX coded and 400 speed it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor. I brought 2 rolls with me but only ended up shooting this one. I liked the look, especially against the glitz of Vegas. When we get out to the desert and check in to our hotel room in Primm, it continued to work great. I like the night shots in the desert and the photo of Mr House experimenting with jet. It was a fun weekend, next year when we go back I’ll bring something that is more thematic.

blog | Happy New Year!

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 11:48:14 -0800

Welcome to 2025!

Look at this, 2025, the most futuristic year yet. Have humans been here before? Have we lived through this life sometime in the past? Is it all cyclical? Are our lives just one long sysyphusian march towards the grave, with our boulder being the knowledge that time is meaningless and nothing we do matters once we shuffle away? PROBABLY NOT! It’s chill, don’t think that way, happy new year!

Not quite my 1 year neocities anniversary but mainting this site through the new year feels like I’m owed a gentle pat on the back. It looks like was posted on June 6 so just about 6 months. It feels so much longer than that!

Games section, coming soon!

I have been playing more games recently, and I think I’m going to put a games section on the site but I’m not exactly sure what that is going to look like. I don’t want to say that I’m reviewing games, but I’m playing them and then I like to practice writing by talking about my experiences, the good and the bad, influences on other games, mechanics, etc. I also like to take a bunch of screenshots and captures which is fun. I need a way to effectively capture screens from retro consoles, like some kind of device hooked up between the console and the tv that has a big red button on it that I can smash, and a png gets generated.

Anyway, pipedream aside, I will be tinkering with the site layout to maybe add a games section, or maybe they will just be assimilated into the main blog roll, idk. That’s another problem for another day!

games | The Last Guardian

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:55:09 -0800

This was mostly written before I had the games section. I’m bringing this over from BlueSky with some additional thoughts.

BOMBS25 Update! Today I finished my 3rd Ueda game, The Last Guardian! A game with a dev cycle of 10 years, I think it’s a miracle it even came out. That miracle does not extend it’s control scheme and gameplay. Of these three games, this was my least favorite, and I don’t think that’s a hot take.

The Last Guardian Box Art

I’m still trying to unravel this conundrum of a game. I don’t like being overly negative when doing a post-mortem like this but there was so much here I should love, that I’m having a hard time not being overly analytical on the details that I didn’t like. The first is the presence of the narrator. In Ico and Shadow of the Colossus you are set off on your journey and it’s you and your companion, and you are IN THE MOMENT. Knowing the narrator is older you breaks that loneliness for me, we’re now being told a tale of what happened and it’s really just a fleeting adventure that has gone by. It was also used to hold your hand and give you traditional tool-tips. Luckily the narrator kind of goes away, and they do loop you together in the end so he does not stay a disembodied voice.

The controls were a mess, my boy never dismounted from Trico gracefully even once. The narrator breaks the solitary feel. Trico gives you no feedback when issuing commands! I wish when i pointed at a ledge, yell GO! JUMP! that Trico would react! Maybe they’ll jump, maybe they won’t. Maybe you need to lead them back and forth and try a few times. Who knows! Give me some FEEDBACK. I also found the climbable elements were not properly delineated from set decoration. SOMETIMES you can grab a cornice, but maybe not! I also feel like Trico was just TOO BIG. This castle was built for these things? They hardly fit! Trico’s a big monster with a fat dumper and has no business in that castle. I enjoyed the story for the most part. That ending was TOUGH but beautiful. But there were some parts of that story that felt like they were written at different times or by someone else. It’s a confused game, right down to the art style. Trico is a realistic beast with every feather rendered individually, with real-time blood stain physics and loads of idle animations. And your boy looks like that Jesus painting that was improperly restored.

Almost 24 hours away from the credits on this game and I’m still thinking about it. Something about Ueda’s control schemes, they aren’t normal, they do things differently and your hands remember. It’s a hard thing to forget, and even though I hated asking Trico to jump or hit or move, I miss doing it.

The story is great & I did bond with Trico making the story that much more difficult. Though I had issues, its a game that will stay with me. I think that its worth pushing through for the emotional highs and lows it offers, just beware, if you’re not a dog person, maybe this won’t be your game.

alternate review

Its your classic “boy meets beast, beast eats boy 3 times, boy soothes beast, beast loves boy, boy and beast escape the clutches of a giant robot orb, boy gets returned to his family and the saddest ending you’ve ever seen happens to the beast” love story, bookended by frustrating controls, confusing design and mismatched visuals. 10/10, would cry again.

blog | Merry Christmas! Now with NitroPress!

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 10:42:16 -0800

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

I hope anyone reading this has a happy holiday season! We’re doing the fun stuff; hanging out, playing games, making food and cocktails.

Catrena got me a NitroPress for Christmas, my hope is to be able to make us cold brew draught lattes in the future. We tried a few different things inside the canister that worked with varying degrees of success. The best thing I made was a Nitro Espresso Martini. I had made a spiced simple syrup for our english trifle we had for Christmas so I used that in the martini.

Tequila Espresso Martini

2oz Tequila (I used reposado)
2oz Kahlua (any coffee liqueur would work)
2oz fresh brewed espresso
1oz simple syrup (i reduced agave syrup with cloves, star anise and cinnamon sticks and a shot of vanilla)

Add all ingredients to the NitroPress canister along with some ice. Close, shake extremely well. I find the NitroPress works the best when everything is REALLY cold. Insert into the base and compress for 8-10 seconds. Then SHAKE AGAIN! Turn upside down and release into your desired coup glass.

It dispenses pretty nice and if you let it settle a minute, it will develop that beautifully creamy head that is a hallmark of nitro beverages. You can do the same thing with a shaker and some vigorous mixing but the head usually dissolves away pretty fast.

Look at that head!

Looking up information on the NitroPress and there are a lot of videos showing you how it works, the same thing over and over again, but not a lot of recipes. If I find anything worthy I’ll be sure to post more here!

games | Kunitsu Gami: Path of the Goddess

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 20:51:41 -0800

Capcom first teased this game in 2021, that I remember. As it was untitled everyone postulated the style of Japanese mysticism could possible mean a new entry in the Onimusha series. The next time it was showed off, it showed a lone ninja character slashing its way through a slurry of twisted, disgusting demons, as well as a name, Kunitsu-Gami. A new IP from Capcom and they swung far out beyond the fences, they were aiming for that special place beyond the beyond, for a game that could feel at home on today’s consoles (though no switch port was certainly a choice) or the dankest PS2 title you’ve never played. A mixture between combo-based character action and a realtime strategy, this game brings a lot of ideas into a pretty refined package.

The core loop of the game works like this:

Start a level in the daytime. You have 12-hours (about 10 minutes, though I never actually timed it) to run around and clear defilement. Defilement comes in 2 flavors, towers that will spit out a bunch of crystals or a cocooned villager that will be freed and added to your roster. Each stage has a set number of villagers (sometimes zero!) and towers, and when you finish each tower you have a bunch of crystals and a special present to open. These presents are at shrines and are often a power-up that can be equipped, a special move or some kind of enhancement.
While it is still daytime you need to use crystals to assign roles to villagers. These are your grunts, your workhorses, your people. Axemen, spearmen, magic users that slow and hurt enemies, guys with big fucking canons, there is a lot of variety, and more get unlocked with each boss you fell. You also need to spend crystals to carve a path for Yoshiro, the goddess you’ve sworn to protect. She only moves during the daytime so it’s best to carve quickly. But since crystals cost the same currency as your units you sometimes need to prioritize one or the other leading to some interesting tension.
Nighttime rolls around and the tori gates in each stage come alive, unleashing a ton of enemy varieties. Some of them need specific units to destroy effectively. They are coming, and they are trying to kill Yoshiro, the goddess you’ve been sworn to protect. Your units AI is pretty smart but you can command them all around. If you wanted, you could go all John MacLane on their asses and try to solo this shit. Soh (your playable character) has a pretty sick moveset and can get pretty powerful

In between stages you can go back to old maps which have been cleaned out, and you put your villagers to task to rebuild. This is pretty simple, you run around the map to different parts that have crumbled and press a few buttons and assign whomever is currently free. the thing that’s hard to put into words about this game is how satisfying all of this shit is. Clearing the defilement, collecting crystals, assigning villagers, finishing tasks and collecting rewards. It’s all QUICK, makes great noises and offers very satisfying feedback! It’s addictive in its design! I want to finish this stuff, beyond the fact that it expands your inventories and gives you additional rewards.

I loved this game. It was just unique, even though there was plenty of influence felt. I hope the team received enough praise and the game sold well enough that they get to do something else like in the future!

fun fact - there are few screenshots for this because xbox apparently started to delete all screenshots on the xbox drive after 90 days and locally after about 21 which is absolutely clown shit. leave my local files alone

games | Remember Me

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 16:49:46 -0800

This was written before I had the games section. I’m bringing this over from BlueSky and adding a few additional thoughts.

Let’s kick off the Back on My Bull Shit 2025 (BOMBS25) with a PS360 gen game deved by Don’t Nod (née dontnod). It has a bunch of interesting ideas & handles great, but oh my god the story is A HUGE mess and the combat system falls flat, relying on a lot of waiting for certain moves to cooldown.

The setting and art direction are great, the parkour stuff works wonderfully and is an intriguingly fun 6 hour romp through French game design (replete with some questionable enemy design). The english VO can be pretty bad! Voices do not match these characters. Play it in French. Excellent 7/10 game.

To expand on this, Remember Me succeeds at being a fun beat-em-up character action game full of parkour and a fairly unique world and level design. What it fails at, unfortunately, is this unique combo building mechanic. The core of this is you have some empty combo strings (x-x-y or x-y-x-y-x) and it’s up to you to unlock different pressens to fill each of those slots (like pressin’ a button, get it?). You have damage, health and cooldown pressens. There is also a modifier pressen that works to multiply those that come before it.

This seems like a good idea in theory, but it begins to suffer because they dole this out so slowly that you only have really specific pressens available at key points in the game, they might as well just unlocked the combos, at that point they could have made them attack differently. Because even though you are making your own combos, they are just punch/kick/repeat. What they aren’t are various interchangeable moves that setup enemies or finish them in any specific way. So if you are hoping to built the ultimate frame-cancelling air juggling combo that would make Danté blush you’ll be disappointed.

The repetition of the combat aside, the thing it’s trying to do is get you to balance powerful punches with punches that heal you and reduce the cooldown time on your special moves. This is where the game starts to lose its footing. Some enemies can only be attached after you use a special move to stun them or make them visible. And after you do this the cooldown on that move starts (90 seconds, maybe more, depending). So you have enemies you can only hurt with the special, but then you have to wait for these moves to come back, and to make those cooldown pressens useful they start throwing waves of neverending guys at you to farm health or cooldown from. But sometimes those guys down’t show up? So you are just dancing around trying to not get hit for a few minutes in between bouts with the stronger enemies. It can be not fun! It’s a shame too because when Nilim doesn’t have to rely on the gimick and can just use the environment and her nimble attacks to do some damage, her attacks are very fun, even if a bit shallow.

blog | God, I Hate Wordpress

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 21:58:56 -0800

I have a personal website that I run for my business which, up until about 2 months ago, I’ve hosted on AWS. At some point in 2014 my website, which had always suffered some issues and outages when it was on Dreamhost, finally got hacked, and it got hacked hard. Some kind of ISIS sympathy and/or recruitment group hacked my site once and for all, I only learned this had happened after a client had called and asked me what was going on. It was like out of a movie, complete with out of place animated gifs just to punctuate their mission. I have a screenshot of it on some website somewhere, I wonder if the way back machine has a snapshot of that?

So I learned how to deploy a website on a micro instance of AWS and built a new, bigger, better website. I also took the time to completely redesign my entire brand. It was very satisfying, actually and I’m glad I took the time to do it. But for whatever reason that micro instance was costing me anywhere between 30-40 bucks a month! And I don’t know why! It’s a pretty low-lift website. It runs on wordpress but was really just 3 pages, a home page, an about page and a gallery page.

In the hopes of being efficient and to save a little money, I decided to migrate my website to the hosting that Catrena’s website was on (also wordpress, also just a few galleries and a small blog). That website was always going down but I thought it was because i wasn’t paying attention to it. So in April or May of this year I migrated my domain, rebuilt mine and her site … on hostgator. I don’t know if you know this or not but HostGator is like the worst host on the internet. They suck. They are just like… the worst. Bad service, up-charges for everything, its very bad. I don’t remember why but we like, inherited this hosting. I think a friend of hers had set this up years ago and since it was paid for in advance, I figured we should just use it.

Come November (the 9th to be exact), i get a down detector email at 2am telling me that both of our website were down. Long story short, malware on BOTH the sites caused some major issues with .htaccess and all the sites permissions, and her site was spared, mine was completely erased. I’m now in the process of getting her website backed up, I’m going to use UPDRAFT, as well as scanning for malware and closing up some security holes. For that task I’m using GOTMLS.net.

I really should just rebuild my professional website with Hugo, it doesn’t need to do a lot! I now have 3 whole galleries and an about page. And I don’t update it all that often! I don’t know if i’ll do that because I like my theme and my site is cool and unique, so I just need to make sure to keep backups regularly and monitor problems as they arise.

blog | Recipe: Winter Beef Stew

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 19:09:38 -0800

I made a really wonderful beef stew this evening, and since one of the reasons I started this site was to have a place to put recipes I’ve decided to write up how I made this. It really was amazing.

Before Thanksgiving, Catrena had seen a Tik-Tok about beef stew and it planted the bug in our mind. Since we’ve been busy (💍) it had to wait until after we had gotten back for a quick vacation. I knew I wanted it to be a big, hearty stew and that I wanted it to be served on a bed of mashed potatoes. The beef I used was a smaller 2 pound chuck roast I had in the freezer. I broke the beef down in sizable cubes. I like when a beef stew has meat that you can cut with your spoon, larger pieces help make it feel more rustic.

Once broken down, I browned the cubes in some olive oil until both sides had a chance to get a good crust on it. This is my favorite part about cooking, the order of operations! Once you figure out the order a dish is best prepared in, its like magic. Anyway, remove the meat and sautée onions in the same oil (chances are you’ll have some of that beef fat still in the bottom of the pot). This is also when you add in your garlic! When the onions are clear and before the garlic turns, it’s time to deglaze!

I have been making my own red wine vinegar over the last year, which is really quite easy. A friend of ours had these big, beautiful antique 5 gallon barrels she’d been storing her leftover wine in and it was very tasty. So, inspired by that, I’ve been pouring any red leftovers into one bottle along with the mother from some homemade apple cider vinegar Catrena’s cousin sent us home with. It’s working quite well and is very mild, but it worked as an incredible base for the stew.

Deglaze with red wine vinegar, add back the stew along with any other vegetables you may want. For this stew, I had a big bundle of white button mushrooms that needed to be eaten, as well as some gold potatoes. These along with carrots and celery would make for the contents of the stew. There are two other things to consider here, the liquid and the spice.

Since I make my own stock 3-4 times a year, I usually opt to use whatever is in the fridge (or more likely freezer). Anytime we make or trim a chicken, or use up a rotisserie from the store, I'm saving those trimmings and carcasses in the freezer. After I've got enough to fill a pot I'll simmer it all day on the stove. It makes a great lazy day activity, you feel like you're doing something but you're really just poking a giant pot of bones. I also keep a tub in the freezer that I fill with all vegetable waste because free veggie stock is great.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

Keep a container in your freezer & fill it with veggie peels and trimmings! Then you can make fresh veggie stock all year!

I am out of veggie stock, so chicken stock it is! this works out great because the beef is fatty, the wine and onions are heavy, the chicken stock compliments everyone by bringing a smooth, lighter stock to the party. With my liquid sorted, I turn my attention to the spice and seasoning. I’ve already salted the beef as it went in to brown, and we’ll adjust the salt later to taste, so what else?

Worcestershire Sauce
tamari (only gluten free soy sauce in this house)
garlic powder
onion powder
smoked paprika
cayenne pepper
mustard powder
cardamom (from the pod)
cinnamon
black pepper
white pepper

This is the first time I’ve used cardamom pods! Cut the tips off, dump the peppercorn seeds into a mortar and pestle and grind em up. The cardamom, mustard powder and cinnamon (just a little, like a teaspoon) help bring up those classic stew flavors, and it gives it a warmth and brightness that really compliments the beef.

This is it, taste it, see if it needs anything, give it a touch more salt if necessary. It sounds more complicated than it really is.

cut beef & brown
cook onions
add wine and additional veggies
add stock
add spice and seasoning
salt and pepper
simmer for a few hours

You’re checking to see if the connective tissue in the beef has broken down. There is a lot of fat and tendons in a chuck roast and the lower and slower you cook it, the more tender the meat becomes. I think I left mine go for about 3 hours. Time can be the enemy of your other vegetables, but luckily the Yukon golds (with peels) will hold up well. Russets (which I like for mashed) will begin to break down after too much cook time.

If you choose to make, I hope you enjoy!

galleries | Halloween Madness 2024

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 09:17:17 -0800

I dressed as Peter Jackson for a Lord of the Rings group costume and I didn’t get a single picture! This roll spans between two parties, 2 nights apart. The first, classy and dignified.

The second, silly and uncouth.

Our intrepid Olympus Accura wins again, as it over performs in areas I thought it would falter. Maybe its time I stop leaning on the failure of the gear and embracing my ability to suss out the best way to shoot a scenario?

As much fun as the first night’s party would be, the second night would be the kind of chaotic adventure that only comes from embracing an evening full of youthful enthusiasm and zest. Our group decided, even though we are Ren Fair die hards and do medieval adjacent dress throughout the course of the year, to be Lord of the Rings characters. We had:

Boromir
Denethor
Gandalf
Saruman
Peter Jackson (me!)
Eye of Sauron, sorry SEXY Eye of Sauron (Catrena!)
Aragorn

We also had a cowboy, a hippie hitchhiker and a wacky inflatable waving arm tube guy, but lets not get hung up on the details (Polaroids of the group coming soon.). This was at something called the Brew-ha-ha, an all-you-can-drink (as long as they don’t run out) beer, cider, etc fest that also brought a long a few bands I remember (but had never seen) from the 90s; Save Ferris & Lit. After enough all-you-can-drink, any of us could be found in that pit, even Gandalf.

I haven’t really used the zoom lens on this Olympus Accura, it took inebriation to get me out of my comfort zone to push in on the band and I’ll be perfectly honest, the results are great. I had the wherewithal to shut off the flash, and only tried to shoot when the band’s lights were blasting. And it worked out!

This roll is far from perfect, but its exemplary of the night as a whole. In the right light even a blurry photo starts to look cool. Check out the full gallery below.

galleries | Halloween 2024 - Rocky Horror & Roller Skates

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:57:00 -0800

I have a confession!

Even though I was a capital-H Horror Junkie, I’ve never seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I was younger I wouldn’t let myself enjoy that as it felt too mainstream, too much of a normie thing to do. By the time I would stop caring about that sort of thing, it just never came up! I lived my life without it. So when it came up in conversation this Halloween, we had to go. And it was great! I decided to load the Olympus Accura up with my favorite Black & White film, Ilford XP2 400. It’s a C-41 processed bw film, so a lot of people discount it as not “true” BW. You lose out on the convenience of being able to process it yourself, but you get EXCELLENT contrast, sparkly whites and dreamy mid-tones. It’s the bw film I’ve shot on the most. There were a few shots I tried to get off in the theater without flash that came out blurry (surprise surprise) as well as a few missed focused street shots where I was shooting from the hip.

This roll really impressed me! I love this camera. It looks so remarkably average but it really have everything I need and it was cheap. I am CONSTANTLY surprised by how sharp the lens seems, even though it never makes it to any of the prestige camera lists. My only complaint is I didn’t buy them both when I saw them in the shop!

blog | Its a New World This Day

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:28:03 -0800

FUCK

The day after the 2024 election, it’s a very different world from when last I updated this blog. I saw that as if I believe it but I don’t, it’s the same world but we now see more of it. An overwhelming majority of the country has decided to embrace hatred, corruption, ignorance and pseudo-science. The embrace will bring upon the second term of a very corrupt cabal of people who really only seek to better themselves! It’s very frustrating to watch! It will be even more frustrating to live with it for four years.

But we’ll endure, as a society, hopefully! It could very well be a total unmitigated disaster (most certainly) and the supreme court is going to be fucked into the ground for 40 years, but we’ll survive by embracing those that need help, mutual aid and community. It’s going to be tough, but I’m going to have some hope that the entirety of the upcoming administration will self-implode. The first four years were filled with infighting, firings and backstabbing, why would this turn around be any different? Here’s hoping!

bleets | October 28, 2024

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 14:12:16 -0700

This is the first of the fakest of tweets. Oh cool, it’s kind of working. This is very nice and I think this is going to work out A-Okay. Here are some images of the boys just to see it working with images.

cameras | Pentax Auto 110

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 21:42:17 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Pentax

model

Auto 110

format

110

style

SLR

lens

interchangeable, 5 total available

Sample Galleries

Pentax 110 Scans

Thoughts

The pentax auto 110 is such a conundram. Not the only 110 SLR but definitely the smallest to hit the market, it seems like such a funny arms-race to us, now, in 2024, who has a camera in the most powerful and stupid device mankind could ever dream up which we carry with us all the time. To see a company bend over backwards to create a pretty sophisticated, mechanical wonder half the size of a pack of cigarettes (or like… one really chunky box-mod if vaping is more your style) is wild to see today. The amount of work that went into, first, launching the 110 format, getting labs on board with developing that cartridge based film, the equipment needed to make prints and then launching an SLR, a premium camera in a market full of very cheap, practically disposable 110 cameras. Its a sisyphisian challenge!

This is my Auto 110 kit, which is missing a few things. I believe i have one other lens which I found separate from this kit. Upon quick inspection this camera still seems to be functioning, I just need to replace the two batteries and throw in some film.

blog | Tutorial: Using Affinity to Develop Negatives

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 21:03:14 -0700

I was poking around my NAS the other day looking to see if some negatives I had archived had been scanned. Well I found those scans which was fine BUT I found something even more interesting, a roll of developed 110 film that I shot sometime between 2010 and 2014. I had not just developed it, but I also digitized it using my Canon 6D, which I sold some years ago to buy into the Fuji mirrorless family, which I still use to this day. I scanned the negs and … that was it I guess. I did edit and crop one photo, which I’ve used as a background for some years, and I maintain it could be one of my favorite candids of all time. Top 3 at least.

I don’t know the details about this crop and edit, but I’m assuming it was made with lightroom, which I used at the time. I would not be caught getting into the trap of perpetual software subscriptions so I decided to ditch Lightroom and move to Capture One for tethered shooting and processing, and the Affinity Suite of Photo and Designer. I really like Affinity, I think it works great, is fairly powerful and user friendly and a steal at the sale price of 25$ each. The way they’ve handled updates and version increases has been fair and as long as they keep their hands out of the generative AI pie, I can see myself being a user for some time.

All of this is to say that I’ve come up with a way to “develop” negatives into proper scans using Affinity, and it is not something I saw a lot of information on so I figured I’d write up a little tutorial.

When you first drag a raw file into Affinity, you are greeted with a new layout with tools that are specific to working with RAW photos. The CR2 files from my Canon 6D were openend quickly. I should say that I tried to use RawTherapee but hated the way the raw files looked.

On to Affinity and came up with this method. I’ve setup my workspace maybe differently than most, but I see no need for waveforms or scopes or exif editors, etc. I trimmed this down to the basic needs of someone who is just looking to manipulate the visuals of the RAW file.

Since Affinity doesn’t offer a toggle to invert the image, you have to use the CURVES panel to do it for you. This can make the fine tuning a little confusing as everything ends up being reversed but after the first few sliders I got used to it. So grab the top right slider and drag it to the bottom right and the bottom left and drag it to the upper left. Yay! A positive negative… a positive positive? Whatever it is, I’m positive you’ll be love it.

You can continue to fine it from there just like you would any other profile you’d be setting.

Once I got an image to a place I was happy, I saved this as a preset from the dropdown menu in the Tones tab. After this I used the BASIC tab to fine tune my adjustments. The crop tool is on the left-hand side and there is a straighten tool, that you can drag across a horizontal or vertical line to fix the skew. There are also tools here that let you adjust for lens abberations and distortion, which I didn’t go too far into here.

I don’t have a lot experience tuning my negatives. I know what I like out of photos, and I have profiles that I enjoy when shooting digital, but one thing about film that is great is seeing where the cards lie. So my personal technique here is to make it look good to me. I think a lot of photography (and most arts for that matter) comes down to personal taste. So learn what the sliders and knobs and menu options do, understand how they work together, and experiment!

I had looked at the “taco treat” photo for a long time but when I went in to edit, I ended up with a version that I actually like more. It feels more grounded in reality. But now looking back at the old version, I think they are both valid. It’s all a matter of taste.

Check out the full gallery

galleries | Pentax 110 Scans

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:57:33 -0700

Here are the scans from my old cartridge of 110 film, shot on the Pentax 110. I’m not ready to really review the shooting process because it has been so long since I’ve used the camera I wouldn’t be giving it a fair shake. My guess is that I’m going to love it because its so freaking small and cool.

galleries | The Misadventures of a Misfiring Konica

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 09:22:56 -0700

Let me present to you the tale of my Konica Big Mini 301. A camera that you often see described as “Premium… but fragile.” I like the way the camera feels and the way it handles is remarkably easy. It has nice lines, and almost sharp edges, cool textures on the top and bottom. The way the lens barrel recedes and protrudes is all very sleek and cool. The back holds all the functions, which coming to do some research is half the reason of its downfall. You see there is a very flimsy and fragile ribbon cable that serpentines itself around the hinge-point of the film door and this cable is prone to breaking. Whether that is the reason for the following double exposures and poor tracking, I’m not quite sure yet, I have not taken mine apart to fully inspect it yet.

Sometime in 2015 I loaded this camera with a roll of film and shot a handful of frames. I then put the camera in a case and that case got thrown into a bag and then a storage bin. This was a pretty big point of transition of my life so its no wonder these cameras were abandoned for some years. Fast forward to a few months ago when this camera was unearthed. Battery dead, undetermined amount of frames shot. New battery purchased, installed and… the winding motor beginning whirring one way or another and the frame counter resets.

So I let it ride. I thought maybe I would lose a few shots in the middle of the roll, but never thought it would result in primarily double exposures. These aren’t just double exposures over the old pictures. It feels like there is something wrong with the winding motor. I need to take a roll of film that’s been ruined and load it into this camera and examine how it winds and how it rolls. You can see frames bleeding into one other, shots taken minutes apart stacked up. It would have been useful to keep a log of each frame, and I have bought some notebooks to do exactly this but my impulsiveness has not been squelched so I have not taken them out.

cameras | Fuji GS645s

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 12:45:02 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Fuji

model

GS645s

format

120

style

Rangefinder

lens

Fujinon 60mm f4

addl

manual advance lever & built-in light-meter

aperture

f/4 to f/22

battery

2 SR-44 / LR-44

self-timer

true

shutter

copal shutter

shutter-speed

1 to 1/500 second

Sample Galleries

Old Slide Film

Thoughts

I wrote up some thoughts in the first gallery that I put up but to reiterate, I really enjoy using this. Its easy to use, has a very accurate meter and is quick to focus when it wants to. What do I mean by that? My rangefinder patch is getting stuck and I’ll need to open it up and oil it. It should be a pretty straight forward bit of maintenance but I had been waiting until the roll was done. Besides a thorough cleaning I need to patch a small whole on the side of the lens housing. The first roll I put through it was to determine if there were any light leaks. I have already superglued parts of the lens housing shut and painted that black. This was something I found online years ago about how to keep this lens for leaking light too bad. So far the results are good! That major break didn’t seem to be causing the leak, that light washing that was present on my roll was pretty consistent with loose handling of the 120 roll film.

galleries | Olympus Half Frame Cosplay

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:29:15 -0700

Continuing the spree of cameras put away without finishing off the film inside is the fabulous and legendary Olympus Pen FT. This camera is so cool, it just feels cool in the hand. The shutter button is this long, rectangle but still maintains the screw-in shutter release port. Even though the camera leans on the smaller side of SLRs, it still feels nice to hold, at least in my hands. Of course this is a half-frame camera, so the viewfinder and frame is portrait oriented which I really enjoy.

I originally loaded this film with Tri-X 400 in 2017 and went to Long Beach Comic-Con (which is coming back in 2025 apparently!). My thought was it would be really fun to take close-up, black and white portraits of cosplayers. I don’t really know why I abandoned the idea, it could have been anything, time, money, ambition, etc, but I feel like this at least proves the concept is sound.

In 2017 I was using the sunny-16 method to meter, but since I brought this out storage I bought a Wein Cell MR-9 mercury cell adapter which lets you load a modern battery into an adapter and it steps down the voltage. So I never used the absolutely bananas, very convoluted light-meter this camera has, which I will write-up a guide to at some point. But its very strange and I’m not even sure I was using it correct as some of these feel under exposed.

galleries | Guest Photographer - Catrena's End of Summer Trip

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:56:28 -0700

Catrena took the wonderful and quite reliable Olympus Accura on a trip with her to visit her family. When asked if she had any thoughts, she had this to say:

“For someone who is not a photographer, the camera was dummy proof while being easy and fun to use! And I feel good I almost nailed every shot.”

Personally, I am amazed she hit focus on the most excellent winking selfie.

galleries | Old Slide Film

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:56:28 -0700

Part of the fun of getting this blog up and running was not just about re-learning some programming tips or to work on my writing, even though these are both very large positives. No, I really wanted to use this website to be able to talk about film cameras and share some developed film with whomever may want to see them. Since I had an obsession with film cameras going back a decade or more, I have a lot of cameras with partially shot film just hanging around. 2024 was my year to start digging around storage and getting those cameras out and finishing off the rolls AND actually get those bastards developed. I know I’ve talked about developing these tiny time capsules, but it really is amazing to see old photos resurface in a way that scrolling through your camera roll just cannot replicate.

Enter the Fujifilm GS645s.

I love this camera… in theory. It’s portrait orientation (just like a half-frame or the most excellent Big Shot!), it’s a rangefinder, it hangs from the straps in a bad-ass way and it has this bizarre roll-cage around the lens. Apparently the story goes that this lens is notoriously fragile, so to help protect it from getting straight sheered off, Fujifilm engineers put this curly plastic cage around 3/4 of the camera lens. Whether or not that’s true I don’t know, but it sounds plausible considering I have seen broken lenses on the internet and if its on the internet, it has to be true! So after some years I’ve finally finished off a roll of slide film and got it developed! Apparently this camera secretly rules and once I finish off some other projects I’m going to devote some very padded space in my bag for this thing full-time. I didn’t nail every shot but there is potential here. I need to take it back out, slow down, and really put it through its paces.

P.S. I absolutely do not endorse Kennedy for president, nor anyone he is associated with but I was shooting slide film and these dumb idiot mural was just too colorful not to shoot. Fuck that guy.

blog | Updated Tech Horror List

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 20:57:20 -0700

CyberBuffalo’s Halloween 2024 Totally Cyber Movie List

I’ve been putting the X-Files on at night as well as in the background as I’ve been doing work around the house. It’s the perfect halloween time show. It has a great soundtrack of the blended pianos and strings and it always looks like its fall out no matter what time of year they are in.

Season 5, Episode 11, titled “Kill Switch” it’s one of the best episodes in general, but it also deals with body horror and cyber punk themes. Watching this reminded me that on my old cyberbuffalo site (rip) I had written a pretty good cyber horror list for thematic halloween viewing but since I kept no back-ups of that, its gone gone gone. I tore back through a discord that I spend most of my online chatting time, thinking I would have shared it and while I did, we didn’t list out each entry. Here’s what I know & remember about that list:

It has 15 entries
I wrote that it was a tech-focused list for the spooky season
I “realized that horror peaked in the year 2000”
Brainscan was one of the movies.
Hardware was also there.

If you are browsing the internet looking for a cool list of movies to watch because you’re currently hunkered down, nose to a soldering iron while being soothed by the soft whir of your 3d-printer behind you, these few are a good start. I think you could also add on CHOPPING MALL which is about a killer security system in a mall, its fun and gory.

This won’t be the last time I throw some media recommendations out there, though. Maybe I’ll even get some friends in on it hint hint nudge nudge.

galleries | Labyrinth Ball on Werewolf B+W

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:57:33 -0700

There is this event in LA that happens every August called the Labyrinth Masquerade where people come from all over to show off their costume and make-up mettle to the nerds of the world. I had picked up a roll of Wolfman 100 from the East LA Film Shop and though of no better place to actually shoot this. It was a hot August night full of faes, knights, Jareth’s and of course, actual wolf-men. I used my favorite point-n-shoot of the moment, the Olympus Accura and I was shocked at the sharpness of some of these. Since I’m using Neocities I don’t upload the highest quality images and even still I’m impressed by some of these. Its also nice to blow an entire roll in one local. Shoot like film is free!

cameras | Olympus Pen FT

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:18:30 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

olympus

model

PEN-FT

format

35mm

style

SLR

lens

interchangeable

addl

double stroke film advance

battery

MRB625 / Can be used with MR-9 adapter with SR43

self-timer

true

shutter

rotary focal plane

shutter-speed

B to 1/500 second

Sample Galleries

Olympus Half Frame Cosplay

Thoughts

Here are some random thoughts and reviews about this camera!

cameras | Polaroid Go

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:18:15 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Polaroid

model

format

instant

style

instant

lens

35mm equivelant

aperture

f12 to f52

battery

built-in 750 mAh (usb-c)

film1

Polaroid GO

focus

fixed focus

shutter-speed

1/125 - 1 second

I have yet to develop any film from this camera!

Thoughts

Here are some random thoughts and reviews about this camera!

cameras | Polaroid Now

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:18:08 -0700

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Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Polaroid

model

Now (Gen 1)

format

instant

style

instant

lens

close-up 94.96mm / distance 102.35mm

addl

no exposure compensation

battery

built-in 750 mAh (micro-usb)

film1

Polaroid 600

film2

i-Type

flash

built-in

focus

dual lens fixed focal zone

I have yet to develop any film from this camera!

Thoughts

Here are some random thoughts and reviews about this camera!

cameras | Konica Big Mini 302

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:17:50 -0700

1 2 3 4 5 6

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Konica

model

Big Mini 302

format

35mm

style

automatic

lens

35mm

addl

-1.5 to +1.5 exposure settings

aperture

f3.5

battery

1 CR123

exposure

auto exposure

flash

built-in

focus

autofocus

self-timer

true

shutter

electronic

shutter-speed

1/360 to 7.5 seconds

Sample Galleries

Thoughts

I’ve gotten two rolls of film devloped from this camera, one was compltely blank and the other was full of misfires and double exposures. While there were some cool results, its not what I was hoping to see from a higher-end camera. I’ve written up some more specifics in this gallery. I had been working on a third roll when I received the first two back from the lab. As if it were fate, the camera stopped powering on so using a changing bag, i removed the roll of film from that camera and hand wound into my olympus xa. That should be a fun roll when it’s back from the lab!

blog | Another August Update

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 20:54:58 -0700

Yes, Another Update in August

I’ve actually been knee deep in the code for cyberbuffalo this past few weeks. We’ve had some time off and it’s been hot and i haven’t really wanted to be out in the workshop. I also got a bunch of film back from the lab and wanted to spruce some things up around here. I really wish I was maintaining more of a changelog for the site because it’s really went through a lot these past few weeks. I’ve already talked about the galleries getting updated and adding in some code markup. But I decided to add a completely new section this time and with that, fix up a bunch of stuff along the way.

Cameras & Relationships

I decided to add a new section to the site, Cameras!! As I continue to update that galleries section, it’d be nice to add some notes or short reviews about the cameras that I use. But how to do it?

The Failed Path - Front Matter

I had the thought that I could create a template via shortcode. That template would be some kind of reiterative list of features and some pictures. I had the idea in my head. No big deal. In the front matter i’d make a list, something like this:

camera = 'camera name'
	feature 1 = 'description'
	feature 2 = 'description'
	...
	feature 8 = 'description'

and then you coud iterate through those with {{ range }}. Long story short, I was using the wrong variable.. This caused a lot of bugs on my page and inconsistent results. Before I decided to reach out to the wonderfully supportive hugo community, I thought that it was an issue with the front matter so I decided to switch to putting all of my camera info into a YAML file located in the data section of my hugo site. There was a blog that I followed which I have lost the link to about creating a YAML file of completed books and it was pretty helpful to get started. So now that I have this YAML file, I define the camera in the front matter

+++
title = "Olympus XA"
date = "2023-08-24T18:49:46.000Z"
draft = false
featured_image = "images/1.jpg"
summary = "the pocket rangefinder that could."
tags = ["camera"]
camera = "olympusxa"
+++

{{ $cameraval := .Page.Param "camera" }}

Pulls in the name of the camera and then we pass it on the YAML file:

{{ $order := slice "maker" "model" "format" "style" "lens" }}
	{{ $camera := index .Site.Data.cameralist.cameras $caminfo }}
		{{ range $order }}
			{{/* print all known fields in the desired order */}}
			{{ $k := . }}
			{{ $v := index $camera $k }}
				{{ if eq $k "maker" }}
					<li class="cameraList"><a href="/categories/{{ $v }}" class="listHead">{{ $k }}: {{ $v }}</a></li>
				{{ else if eq $k "format"}}
					<li class="cameraList"><a href="/categories/{{ $v }}" class="listHead">{{ $k }}: {{ $v }}</a></li>
				{{ else if eq $k "style" }}
					<li class="cameraList"><a href="/categories/{{ $v }}" class="listHead">{{ $k }}: {{ $v }}</a></li>
				{{ else }}
					<li class="cameraList">{{ $k }}: {{ $v }}</li>
				{{ end }}
		{{ end }}
		
	{{ range $k, $v := $camera }}
		{{ if not (in $order $k) }}
				{{/* print remaining fields not contained in the desired order;
				by that, additional fields unknown at the time of writing this
				shortcode are still printed at the end of the list */}}
				<li class="cameraList">{{ $k }}: {{ $v }}</li>
		{{ end }}
	{{ end }}

And it’s working out! I then added a bunch of formatting to this, but not too much. I also wanted to have a way to display some pictures of the cameras, but since a lot of this is taking place in a shortcode that splits the formatting into 2 column divs, I didn’t want to use a gallery shortcode from the main markdown file. I had toyed with coverting the gallery shortcode into a partial but I also thought that wouldn’t look right there. So I wrote a little CSS/HTML only carousel with the help of this tutorial. I added a little film strip background… as a treat, and tweaked the responsiveness settings so thigns stack up on mobile.

I also started to tweak the OpenGraph embed settings for the galleries. I need to rethink the way I’m storing featured images because it would make the embeds better and be less work on me to not have to make “cover.jpg” and “featured.jpg” and then add in my gallery images. I’m going to continue to toy around with that as well.

I think from this point out I’m going to keep a changelog, maybe even just locally, of all the changes I’ve made. It’ll at least help me remember everything I was doing, and isn’t that one of the halmark reasons to write something down in the first place?

One Last Thing!

OKAY! I have decided to also add a CYBERBUFFALO TIP! shortcode to the site as well. I can add text to the left side of the page and then the tip goes to the right. This was something that I had used in my cyberdeck manual and wanted to figure out the CSS to do it on my website as well.

CYBERBUFFALO SAYS:

You can enter whatever you want here, within reason!

galleries | Comic Con Rangefinder

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 21:55:57 -0700

I also took the Olympus XA with me to comic-con, loaded with a roll of expired Portra 800. I realized something after I got the roll back, I think I was click thing aperture setting up one click too far, I think I had it set to “FLASH” when I was trying to set it to 2.8. Trying to shoot in lower light, and trying to be quick I wasn’t really focused too much on the settings. The next roll I push through this I’m going to take my time and make some notes of my exposures.

galleries | Comic Con Point & Shoot

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:00:18 -0700

When we want to comic-con this year, I took four film cameras. The Olympus XA which I’m still putting through its paces and getting reacquainted with, the Olympus Accura Infinity (which this gallery was shot on), my Polaroid GO and the Lomography Instax Square. I only shot a few photos on the instants but I did manage to clean up 2 rolls of 35. Some of these were my favorite photos recently, including one shot of the Mrs. Roper pub crawl that swarmed us at lunch one day. This 10$ camera hs really reinvigorated me love for shooting 35mm.

galleries | Fourth of July Haze

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 23:05:31 -0700

galleries | Expired Kodak Gold

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 22:06:35 -0700

As far back as I can remember I’ve had an unused roll of Kodak Gold 200 sitting in the glovebox of my truck, just cooking in the heat of the southern Californian sun. We recently gave my taco a thorough cleaning and I tossed the roll in my film case. Sometime in the summer it made its way into my favorite current point and shoot. The damaged color tone really adds itself well to the summer vibes, I’m happy I used it for a pool party!

galleries | Old Film Roll from circa 2017

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 22:06:33 -0700

Sitting in my Olympus XA, nestled firmly in a drawer was a nearly complete roll of Kodak Gold 200. I don’t know what happened but I never rewound or developed it until earlier this month. Since I now have a reasonably close place to drop off film I’m trying to make more of an effort to shoot on the cameras I’ve collected over the years.

It really was amazing going through these, seeing old memories preserved in a new way, reminding us of them over again. In a way, it’s the exact promise of film, a micro time capsule.

blog | August Site Update

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 20:27:00 -0700

Update for July / August + Gallery News

I’ve been busy the last few months! We ended up going to Comic-Con this year which was great (as usual). I’ll make a post it at some point showing off some of the things we did, people we met and stuff we picked up. I’m slowly compiling another linkdump but I’m not quite ready for that yet. I did make a blog post about some Killer7 comics today which spurned my desire to make a quick update page.

Galleries Are Back … Again …

… even though they were already working. But neocities got an update which upped the character limit for any files hosted on the service, which means that my PREFERRED method of generating galleries, the hugo-shortcode-gallery is back.

I messed around with also keeping the hugo-easy-gallery around because I like the prospect of using the FIGURE shortcode they included but I’m not ready to keep it active quite yet. I did mess around with that for a while today and I found that just using the gallery to display one image can sometimes be better.

I also messed on the site a little bit. The central (left) section is about 4% wider which actually made quite the difference. That means the two link boxes on the left a little smaller, which is fine, but I also fixed the padding and made the text slightly smaller. I think it helps the readable on longer posts. BUT who knows, this is all going to keep evolving. I added links to the blog and tag sections as well, using the new fancy link/li class I made last time I futzed around.

I also got around to adding some style to the <code> tag, which I’ve been putting off. But now that I wanted to talk about the CLI this was the perfect time to do it.

A lot of what I’m writing here sounds like I’m talking directly to an audience but I’m really mostly talking to myself. I find the best way to remember how to use this scratch-made hugo website, I need to keep notes. The second best way i’ve found it to keep breaking it.

Neocities Command Line Trick

Something I found today that I must have missed when I skimmed the documentation the first time, the Neocities Command Line (CLI) has a way to purge unused files from the webserver. One of the things that happens when you mess around, especially with plug-ins that generate thumbnails or other files on your behalf, is that your webserver will get gunked up junk. So the Neocities CLI has a --prune command for purging anything not being used by your local site. Pretty damned handy for keeping your website nice and lean.

neocities push --prune public

That’s it!

blog | Killer7 Comics

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:41:51 -0700

Collecting Killer7 Comics

I’m a huge fan of Suda51, the Japanese video game creator that runs Grasshopper Manufacture. It’s hard for me to rank his games but on the top of the list would be Killer7. Released in 2005, there is yet to be another game like it. Its just so fucking cool and weird and fresh. Part of my obsession with all things Grasshopper, I like to collect, among other things, official, ancillary paper goods. Art books, official posters, guides, stuff like that. I’ve been meaning to write about my Suda51/Grasshopper Collection for a while now and today is the perfect day to do it because I finally added the last book of the main run to my collection.

I don’t know the entire history of the Killer7 Comic Series, but there was a planned 12-issue release that was cancelled after the 4th issue, possibly due to low sales of the game. As far as I can tell there was also an ISSUE 0, ISSUE 1/2, as well as some cover variants. They were published by Devils Due Comics and the apparently defunct Kinetic Komicz.

Issue 0 was maybe a give-away or pre-order bonus for the game from EB Games (rip)

ISSUE 1/2 was a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive.

Issue 1 had a New York City Comic-Con exclusive cover variant.

Issue 2only had one cover.

Issue 3 had 2 covers, the Kaede & Coyote Smith cover and then the (possibly more common) Andrei Ulmeyda Texas Bronco cover.

Issue 4 also had 2 covers. I’m not sure what’s going on here but this is the B variant.

So…

What’s Next??

I’m going to start to hunt for the variants, now. But I’m not going to spend 250 on a complete set or anything like that. The issue I got in the mail today I picked up in a lot off ebay for a pretty cheap price. I think for me a lot of this comes down to the hunt. I’ll keep looking at comic shops and comic-con and whatnot, but I think those are going to have to be an extremely lucky circumstance to pull that off. The happenstance of finding one of these in the wild, you’d have to have a lot stars align for that to happen. So I’ll keep poking and prodding internet marketplaces. Here’s a little checklist:

Issue 0 (need)
Issue 1/2 (need)
Issue 1 NYCC Variant (need)
Issue 3a Kaede Variant (need)
Issue 4b Variant (need)

Have any of these? Want to send them to a good home? Hit me up on twitter!

blog | Games Updates and July Post

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 18:05:55 -0700

July - The Busiest Month Yet

I’ve one hell of a month, lots of work and everything that comes with that. Stuff like backed up chores, paperwork, drama, etc. I like a good balance of work life and everything else but this month really tipped the scales. I had a load of huge projects at work which resulted in some amazing final projects, but it was a lot of work.

That is all to say that not a lot has happened to warrant a blog but I’m trying to make sure this thing stays current so I’m sort of forcing myself to put together a post on this semi-lazy Sunday afternoon. I’m really just looking for an excuse to think about the History of Space Invaders but I’ll get to that.

Since January I’ve been dealing with an issue with left wrist that left me out of the game, so to speak. I think it was De Quervain tenosynovitis but it was never officially diagnosed. After about a month of dealing with the pain I got a brace, had a physical therapist friend treat me a few times and showed me some exercises to do. Even with all of that it took until about June for normal use of my hand and thumb to come back. I’m still doing stretches and exercises but I’m not using a brace and, more importantly, I’m able to use my thumb and play games again!

In 2022, with the launch of Bayonetta 3 imminent, I decided to devote all of my gaming time towards “Hack & Slash” (or “Character Action”) games. I was a big fan of Bayonetta and decided to really look into Kamiya and the genre he helped create. The following year I wanted to finish filling in some gaps of my favorite game creators, like Kamiya and Suda51.

Without being able to play for so many months of the year, my finished game list is looking pretty anemic. Unicorn Overlord was a big surprise hit for me, I was able to play that kind-of one handed. In the wake of the (excellent) Fallout TV show, I dabbled with Fallout 1. There are two great community editions for Fallout 1 & 2 to get them running on macOS.

I also got a few hours into Disco Elysium, which I found absolutely thrilling, but I really don’t think I’m in the mood for anything extremely narrative currently. Its been a month or so of being not able to commit to any game at all. I’ve started a lot this year and have either given up because of my wrist, work or something else.

Enter the ARCADE

So what do you do when you want to play a game but don’t want to get bogged down all that narrative and junk? Arcade games! I’ve been obsessing over Outrun for some reason. It turns out there is an absolutely excellent project that keeps Outrun 2006 updated for current systems. Outrun2006Tweaks is a very ambitious and interesting project, and it turns out that with the right install process you can get Outrun2006 PC edition running on the steamdeck, and it runs great. After that the most excellent Sega Ages Outrun edition was up on sale for under $3 so I picked that up on the switch. Between those that was a lot of my gaming time in July.

Recently I picked up Space Invaders Forever, which is basically just Space Invaders Extreme for the PSP ported to the switch. Its an excellent port, an even more excellent game and it pushed into a rabbit hole about the history of Space Invaders. It’ll garner a longer thing on my part but I’m going to save that for another time. I want to like do a dive into the series, the creator, the many different iterations of the game. For now I’m just having a great time on the game on the switch.

Lastly, I’ve been playing the excellent new release from Nintendo, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Its an interesting game, it isn’t a sequel to the NES Remix games on the Wii U & 3DS, but it can fill the same itch. Its pretty fun to try to shave some milliseconds off your times. Its a quick “pick up and play” game that I was enjoying more than I expected I would. Its also pretty interesting to read “official speedrunning tips” from Nintendo.

blog | End of June Links

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 21:51:36 -0700

How to Browse like its 2006

I’ve been thinking more and more about creating a links section for this site, to link to pages taht I think are cool or that are friends across the internet. I think I still will one day but I thought that it might be cool to do sporadic link dumps of websites I’ve been browsing or have found recently. These dumps will be whenever I have enough to fill up a post but will mostly be a way to remember things (i hate using bookmarks, i never go back and look). Perhaps if you are reading this you can find yourself spending more time browsing the internet like we used to do, instead of just doom scrolling about the current state of our so-called democracy.

Links from June 2024

film is more fun

camera reviews and great analogue film gallery

spool five

blog, music and random writings. part of the 512kb club

diaxa

great resource for the Olympus XA line of cameras

zuiko camera tech

amazing site that has information on various olympus cameras, specifically the OM and XA line. also offers repair services

garbugli

analogue film photography blog and gallery

mogwai.be

tech blog, foss and hugo info. great tutorial on hugo + simple.css

classic limos

love finding professional websites that still look like they were designed for internet explorer. this is about vintage limos for rent but i was so inspired by the evergreen design

Not a lot of links for June but I’m still working on changing my browsing habits. There has been a lot of USA political drama recently which has kept me more glued to social media more than I want, but i’m working on slowing that down. I’m going to do a better job in the future of keeping track of sites I find interesting, even if they aren’t being updated currently or have been dormant for a long time. A site doesn’t need to be current to have value, especially these days.

UPDATE

I wrote this out and put in links and didn’t like the way it looked. So I decided to write my first custom shortcode in order to format links for a link dump. as of now, I like the way it looks but since its a shortcode I can easily fiddle with it.

blog | Update! Working Photo Galleries

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:46:52 -0700

Just a quick update on the state of the photo galleries. I’ve migrated away from hugo shortcode gallery to semi-current fork of hugo easy gallery. Since I have my site setup using hugo branch bundles, I needed to modify one of the shortcode files to point to the public folder instead of the static folder. It took me a while to figure out what folder it was pointing to but after that change everything seems to be working. I think this gallery system is slower loading than the last one I had used, and I have to create the thumbnails myself (which solved the problem of auto-generated gallery files being too long for Neocities), but for now its nice to browse around. If neocities ever fixes that bug maybe I’ll migrate back.

blog | Physical Media and Me, 2024 edition

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:24:19 -0700

I read an interesting article today on indie wire about Joe Dante’s ‘Matinee’ and the role of the ‘movie within the movie’ that ‘Mant!’ played. It was an interview with Dante mostly talking about some extended footage of ‘Mant’ on the new ShoutFactory! Blu-Ray/UHD 4k release, but it made me start thinking about physical media in my life. There is so much uncertainty in 2024 with not just streaming rights but also the availability of physical media that it actually pushes me further from the idea of owning the media that I love. I already have a fairly hefty collection of video games that I consider selling every time I need to move them around or reorganize them so the idea of increasing that with movies and tv shows is overwhelming. I also feel like the access to these shows will be preserved through extraneous means such as internet film historians and pirate groups that it really will not matter if I go out and buy Furiosa on DVD. Barring a full fledged collapse of the internet as we know it, you’ll mostly have access to most shows and movies if you know where to look (if that collapse were to happen I’m sure that my ability to watch Season 1 & 2 of Friday Night Lights would be a low priority).

I’m not trying to poo-poo efforts of preservation, but I think that championing physical media as the end-all be-all of media longevity is a stop-gap solution. I think instead digital rights access needs to be lobbied for libraries, and libraries need to be ushered into the 21st century with expansion of digital collections. This is all fairly demoralizing because of rampant defunding of public servicing for things like police militarization. That line of thinking can quickly cause a person to fall into a debt spiral so lets try to stay positive.

I do think about trying to capture definitive versions of things I hold dear, honestly mostly tv shows.

30 Rock
How I Met Your Mother
Community
The X-Files
Stargate SG-1
Fringe
Twin Peaks + The Return

These are all shows that I find myself watching and rewatching so why wouldn’t I own them? Looking a few of these up and they are fairly expensive. One day I’ll fulfill my dream and get my own in-network tv channel up and running. Then I’ll have 24 hours of x-files, 90s cartoons and weird-al music videos running for whenever I want them.

God, running a pirate TV network would be so awesome. A man can dream, though… a man can dream.

blog | Neocities & It's Character Limit

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:32:15 -0700

The Galleries are BROKEN!

Just imagine me walking out of a cave and hollering that into the void, just like Chris Elliot in Cabin Boy. But they are indeed not functioning at 100%. Apparently, there is a 100 character limit for filenames on Neocities. This isn’t just limited to the filename, either, as noted on this issue on github. When Hugo Shortcode Gallery does its behind the scenes magic (making thumbnails and the like) it generates these filenames that are fairly long. These get rejected when trying to upload through the neocities CLI. So thumbnails are broken until further notice.

I might play aroudnd with hugo easy gallery though this isn’t being actively developed which is what turned me away from it to begin with. Maybe Neocities will take notice and up the character limit to something more in-line with operating system standards. Or maybe they won’t!

galleries | Early Summer East Coast Trip

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 19:03:21 -0700

Earlier this summer I visited my parents on the east coast for my mothers’ 70th birthday. We made our way into a few antique malls and I pulled a 10$ 35mm point & shoot off a shelf that looked like it was in perfect condition. I bought the thing and grabbed some Fujifilm stock from cvs along with a few batteries. One of the things I like about this camera is that it takes multiple kinds of batteries leaving it open to lots of options. Anyway I ended up throwing 2 rolls of film through it in a couple of weeks, from Massachusetts to New York and then back to LA.

Roll 1

When we got back to Los Angeles I ended up taking the olympus to a Renaissance Fair where it performed well. I wish the fill flash wasn’t so punchy, I might want to experiment taping a bit of ND over the flash to stop it down. You can see in some of these images where they are properly exposed in the background and the subject is just a little too hot, that’s what I’m talking about. It just needs to balance out a little better, though I do generally like the images it produces. Once I run a few more rolls through it I’ll give it a proper review.

Roll 2

blog | First Post

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 21:22:05 -0700

Welcome to the NEW NEW HOME of Cyber Buffalo Industries

An explanation and rundown of how and why I built this site.

Hello! Welcome! I’ve been around and on the internet since the mid-nineties and I can positively say that I’ve never maintained a personal website for myself. With the inevitable collapse of social media or at least the constant commodification of our own input into those sites, it feels like if i want to be able to contribute to the internet in a meaningful way, than making a little website of my own is the only course of action.

So I’ve decided to use hugo!!! … in 2020. Through various events that website is no longer (rip). So then I created a cute little neocities site and that lasted for about a week. About a month ago (sometime around the beginning of May 2024) I had the idea of restarting the hugo site on neocities. I chose a theme, got the entire thing setup and haven’t been happy with it since. I hemmed and hawed about how and why to use it and it really never clicked with me. So I changed themes, I started new development sites, nothing really clicked. It all seemed too complicated, it all felt like more of the same web 3.0 stuff.

Then, sometime in may, I stumbled upon this blog post. This was the tutorial I had been looking for, seemingly written for me in a way that I could really comprehend. I knew what I had wanted my site to look like, more or less, and this really broke down hugo to its most basic elements. If you aren’t a very experienced coder, but want to try to develop your own theme, give this post a whirl.

After running through the 4-part post, I had a mostly functional and completely unformatted website. It was amazing. I was very tempted to keep it that way. One day maybe I’ll crawl back into the primordial ooze and call it “Netscape-Chic” but until then, this is what I’m sticking one. For the styling and CSS of the site I first started to search discmaster. If you are unfamiliar with what this is, its a big, searchable database of old software/shareware/etc cd-roms uploaded to archive.org, its fucking awesome. For the bulk of the layout I actually followed this “blog layout” tutorial from w3schools. It was pretty much the standard layout that I was looking for. Its light, responsive, was easy to implement.

Really the last thing that I needed was a way to display galleries. I have been shooting more film recently and wanted a way to upload and share film scans with friends and family. I looked around and decided to use hugo shortcode gallery. HSG is a “theme component” which means you call it in your hugo.toml (or whatever config file you’re using) in the theme section. It was actually really straightforward to implement and renders extremely fast. So far, no complaints.

A big thanks to my fellow cyberbrother rappy for being an absolute whiz at CSS and helping me some of the more modern parts of website maintenance. He’s a freelance designer and an absolute ease to work with. I literally could not have finished this thing without him.

What I plan to do with this is reach for sky! Of course I would love to get in the groove of being able to update and tweak this site regularly but who knows. Will this be another neocities experiment lost and abandoned? Or will i blog about Fringe and the X-Files? Perhaps I’ll finally dig through my camera collection and at least log what i’ve got, do reviews, post images, give analogue film photography advice. For now, I’m just glad this site is mostly working, and I hope that if you find this from some frustrating google search that, if it makes it way to you through all the images of generative-AI babies being paraded out in front of armies made out of hot-dogs, that it will inspire you to make your own website. And possibly invite me to your webring. I love that webrings are coming back.

| About

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 20:46:05 -0700

Welcome to Cyber Buffalo Industries! An industrious website that might not ever try to sell you something. In the pandemic year of 2020 I decided to teach myself how to 3d model and entered the ZeroDays cyberdeck building competition held by the awesome folks behind the cyberdeck cafe. I wanted to teach myself 3d modelling and 3d printing. I have been a sketch-up user for a long time because of my IRL job, but that was mostly for large scale stuff like rooms and environments. Long story short I decided to turn my long-term nickname into my website and decker persona, thus cyberbuffalo was born.

In real life I’m a set designer working in the LA photography industry. I love photography, especially shooting instant film. Unfortunately my favorite kind of film has been long discontinued so I’m mostly shooting modern polaroid and 35mm. I plan on using this space to upload some photos and create some image galleries.

I’ll add some contact info here in the future, but for now I’ll just link to my ~~twitter~~ bluesky which is mainly for me to keep up on video game news and hang out with shit-talking communists. You can also send me an email, it’s pretty easy. cyb3rbuffalo on gmail.

cbtheme2 theme 1.5 changelog

keeping a list of all changes I’ve made to the cyberbuff theme starting now, August 18 2024. I wish I had started this a lot earlier. I was making some posts everytime i made a change here or there, but just keeping a quick list would end up being the most thorough.

UPDATE - even though its 2025 and I’ve made lots of changes to this, I don’t know shit about version numbers therefore I’m keeping it at version 1.0.

UDPATE - with the release of the games section, I’m calling it, we’re at version 1.5, baby dolls.

[Unreleased]

continue to figure out camera categories for the “database.”
Cameras section - As the list grows it would be nice to be able to sort through some categories. Rangefinder, type, etc. Could do this on the gallery too.
need to port the list for game taxonomies so it follows the games section layout
need to add specific style to the BUFF CERTIFIED series page
RSS Feed needs to renew an article as unread based on the existence of lastmod
Add a last updated to the heading of the games pages.
Add style (and links LOL) to the /blogroll page.

2025

December 3 2025

ADDED a single.html page to the bleets section, which formats the individual look of a single bleet. This also retains the “threaded” functionality.

December 2 2025

CHANGED the behavior of the BLEETS section on mobile. The book bleets and random bleets had some weird behavior with the margins and backgrounds, so I made the graphic small on the background and fixed the margins.

September 1 2025

ADDED linkhut to the 88x31 tabs on the hyperinks section

August 31 2025

CHANGED chats.html to allow for a custom user. Added variables “custuser” & “custavatar”. Put custom avatar in /static/images/ and provide the name.

June 16 2025

ADDED A new class for the newgalleryspec gallery shortcode, wide which will put out a bunch of uncropped images in a gallery.

June 15 2025

ADDED .connectline:has(+h1, +h2, +h3, +p) to the stylesheet. This prevents the .connectline element showing up when it is proceeded by more text like my “Final Thoughts” on a games page.
CHANGED THE ORBS! In the /games section, I started to mess around with making my own orbs and while looking for tips on pixel-art orbs, I found this page, and they rule and I’m using their orbs. Thank you, Flowly!
ADDED A purple orb in games which means I’ve put a game down, indefinitely.

June 5 2025

ADDED The ability to write threads in /bleets! I can use the same command-line utility I wrote, newpost, to make a follow-up post in the bleets’ folder.
ADDED Styling to the threaded bleets, reusing the connectline div but changing to to dashes instead of solid. Also changed the color of the dates and lines.
OH Also, newpost has been updated to PROPERLY figure out the date timezone. The date format that hugo really likes is YYYY-MM-DDT:HH:MM:SS-TZ:TZ. In the newpost I was ignoring the fact that my timezone, which is Pacific time - its either -07:00 GMT or -08:00, depending on if we are in the middle of observing daylight savings time. In Linux (bash? zsh?) You can invoke the current time zone by using %Z but it outputs it as PST or PDT so I added some if/then clauses to dump a variable and adds it to the end of the lastmod and date params.

June 2 2025

ADDED some styling to shortcodes/gameposts.html as well as adding in the connector line to link posts together into a thread.
ADDED z-index to <legend> because the line div was floating on top of it as the viewport shrank. I’ve added in a few rules but I don’t mind if it sits behind the date/time.
ADDED the time of the game posts as well.

May 29 2025

ADDED some css for footnotes

May 28 2025

ADDED New shortcode, csv-to-links.html. This is called from a page like so {{/< csv-to-links "mycoollist.csv" />}}. This is what’s driving my links on the BLOGROLL page.
ADDED New partial, csv-to-map.html which I pulled from the forums thanks to one jmooring. This handy dandy utility will take a CSV file and convert it to a map with proper key and value pairs. I was struggling to get my own version of this working when I found that forum thread and boo bam, we started cooking.

May 26 2025

ADDED A new section to BLEETS! Maybe its not a section, but I can now use certain front-matter on a bleet to make it into a tiny, defacto, in-line book review.

May 24 2025

CHANGED The line underneath the BLEETS date.
ADDED Pagination to the BLEETS section - bleets now shows the last 20 posts.

May 19 2025

FIXED image-gallery CSS, missing bottom padding.

May 13 2025

ADDED new shortcode chats. Let’s me call the shortcode and in between the opening/closing tag you put in lines of text that get rendered to look like chat bubbles. you can use date to set the date and can also include 1 image per block with image.

May 11 2025

ADDED new layout files for the /galleries section; galleries/baseof.html, galleries/list.html
ADDED new partial gallerylist.html
CHANGED the /galleries list page. New list gives a large picture preview with text on top. Uses the user-set featured_image parameter. Also added 2 a new paramenter that controls the vertical position of the featured image, allowing fine tuning.
REMOVED the sidelinks on the /galleries pages.
ADDED link to the RSS feed. I think we’re there! Subscribe via RSS!
ADDED yeargames.html partial for the games lists section, I added a clause where it will list the game using a new front matter parameter shorttitle.

May 6 2025

ADDED series as a taxonomy to config.toml
CHANGED layouts/games/single.html to check front matter for a series. If that series if buff then it adds the corner badge to the header image. Two new pieces of front matter [params] has been added, bufftitle and buffwrite. The first shows up as the heading on the BUFF CERTIFIED section on the bottom of the page. The second can be up to a short paragraph about the game.
ADDED bufftitle and buffwrite to the games/index.html archetype
ADDED (finally) Spoiler Policy to the front page of the games section.

April 3 2025

CHANGED I ran into a weird issue with my camera-used.html shortcode. The last two galleries I uploaded did not have the included shortcode rendered after deploying hugo in the project folder. They rendered fine in the local server 75% of the time. I did a little troubleshooting but I thought this would be the perfect time to take the contents of that shortcode and integrate it into the single template for the galleries section. So that’s whats happened. This probably will not fix whatever was causing that, but for now I’m happy. And I did some reformatting of that section.
CHANGED The camera’s section list.html template has been changed, all of the camera cards are now running on flexbox. This fixed a weird issue that was causing certain cards to skip to the next row in Safari.
CHANGED The Navigation bar, the ever evolving navigation bar my god. Made it wider, made the text bigger, etc.

March 31 2025

UPDATE the gamearticles.html and gametabs.html partials to be more consistent with the rest of the site.

March 29 2025

UPDATE The camera_used.html shortcode has been updated to V2.

March 24 2025

FIXED a bug in the partial yeargames.html (which groups the games by year in that section). The bug was adding a phantom 0001 year to the list which was, apparently as best as I can deduce, being caused by the page bundles _index.md file. Switched my paging method from .Site.Pages to .Site.RegularPages.
CHANGED minor tweaks to the CSS.

March 6 2025

CHANGED My blog directory structure to ``/content/blog/year/month` because it was getting unruly.

March 5 2025

FIXED The way that my lastmod script works. it needed to be reversed and show first 5 in order to show them, latest first.
ADDED article date and gameterms to the games/article pages.

March 4 2025

ADDED in hugo.toml the lastmod flag, so I can try to sort out the Recently Updated section for Games.

March 2 2025

ADDED On Games pages, I’ve decided to add some front matter that I can refer to in the header of the individual pages. So far its Date Started/Ended, Progress (in-progress/complete/on-going), Console & Genre. I might add publisher to that, or “notable personnel” or something. I guess that’s what tags are for. I also fixed the CSS so this new thing is responsive and looks good across devices.
FIXED Some CSS on the single Camera page. Added a first-of-type selector to the .column style.
ADDED A new bullet for Camera Inforation.

March 1 2025

CHANGED The way the lightbox gallery gets its CSS and Javascript files called. Originally, especially because I was testing and learning. Each shortcode had the js/css called, and the lightbox script. NOW it’s in its own shortcode that gets called once per page that uses any of the image shortcodes. I also changed the way the image gallery class is named. In the GAMES section, the class is just games. This lets you arrow through all of the images on that page as if they were built in the same gallery. Bleets & Blog will continue to generate a random class from the page’s date using UnixNano.

February 28 2025

REMOVED Two theme modules, photoswipe and hugo-video.
FIXED Many many many fixes went into the following shortcodes; newvideo.html, newgallery.html, newgalleryspec.html, newsingle.html. I’ve removed all references to those shortcodes as well.
UPDATED all pages in Blog, Bleets and Games.
CHANGED On the shortcodes that crop, I added the center process specification so fix my dislike of the generated thumbnails.

February 26 2025

ADDED new shortcode! newsingle.html along with lots of CSS to make it look good.

February 22 2025

CHANGED the <label> heading to a clamp/scaling font for better readability across devices.

February 21 2025

ADDED The CyberBuffalo Industries QuickBleet Gallery 9000 (patent pending)

February 20 2025

CHANGED The position of the introduction to the bleets section.

February 19 2025

CHANGED the layout of the games pages! No more vertical date
CHANGED the responsiveness of the games section
ADDED Color changing bullets on the games list depending on progress of the game
ADDED console icons on the games list
ADDED collapsable menu on the games section which goes away at 1000px
CHANGED additional little tweaks to the CSS

February 12 2025

ADDED clamp! Thanks to Rappy I’ve learned about a Clamp in CSS! The headings on the blog list pages have been reformatted using this handy tool to hopefully allow more readability across devices.

February 5 2025

FIXED the tags being displayed in the wrong font by splitting up listhead into mainlisthead & listhead.
FIXED the cyberbuffalotip font and spacing was a little off so I tweaked that
ADDED a new class, figureimg which will center and resize an image placed into a figures shortcode.

January 31 2025

ADDED A new option on the games page for a different kind of post, the article. This way if I want to write something about the 5 worst bosses in the Ninja Gaiden series, it separates it out from the games by year.
ADDED new partial, gamearticles.html

January 28 2025

RELEASED cbtheme2 theme 1.5!
ADDED Games Section! This is actually a fairly substantial update which would garner it’s own individual post (eventually). The games section flipped around the layout a bit. It’s listing the games by completion year on the left as well as a new category specific to the games section underneath it. The game pages can pull in Page resources from their bundles. They are displayed in chronological order from oldest to newest.
ADDED A new shortcode, gameposts.html. This orders the games by year.
ADDED A new set of shortcodes from Hugo Easy Gallery. I change the name of the gallery shortcode to galleries.html so it doesn’t mess with the established galleries already published. Also changed that figure shortcode to figures.html. This was done because the way I’m pulling in markdown files into the gameposts, they cannot use the established gallery shortcode, as page resources can’t access page resources. I need to add something that fixes this for video as well.
ADDED A new partial called gametag.html which builds the list of gameterms.

January 26 2025

FIXED The text in the camera section (was running off the card).

January 23 2025

ADDED Doto to theme
CHANGED HEADINGS to use the new font
CHANGED Font size, line heights and some other fiddly text business to make the site more readable.

January 20 2025

FIXED I guess the dates weren’t working on any of the list pages, and that has now been fixed!
CHANGED date/time on bleets to {{ .PublishDate }}
CHANGED li {list-style-position: inside;}
CHANGED background color for the links to the numbered images on the camera pages.

January 19 2025

CHANGED some additional CSS in relation to the BLEETS making them more responsive, also justified them to the right and made the container smaller. This change was to facilitate making them look more like what we’re used to, so if you were to screenshot one, it would have a more similar shape and look better on mobile.
CHANGED CSS to make the site wider on ipad sized screens 800 and below.
FINE TOOTS WAS TAKEN, I’M CALLING IT BLEETS!
FIXED a CSS mistake that caused all bullet lists to go away.

January 18 2025

FINE I’M NAMING IT TOOTS!
ADDED A GODDAMNED MICROBLOG SECTION. I’m calling “Notes” for now, but I want to call it faketweets, as its labeled. Maybe I’ll name it ’toots’ in the future.
ADDED a new card section on the left side, //Hyperlinks. I’m just trying to satisfy my 88x31 curiosity. With links to some of my social pages.
CHANGED the menu layout is now left-justified. This gives me room for expansion and isn’t too small on mobile.

January 12 2025

FIXED Responsiveness on mobile! I finally took my time and really went through those media queries and got everything situated. The menu just gets smaller, the summary wraps around the featured image, tags and dates go away because we don’t really need that information on a smaller screen. I also made the featured image bigger when the screen gets smaller. Happy with this.
ADDED a new image shortcode as I was getting frustrated with figure and the vanilla markdown.

January 11 2025

FIXED Navigation menu on mobile
ADDED Classes to the <p> tags on the listcard.html so they can be hidden for mobile

January 8 2025

ADDED New front matter parameter called defaultImage which lets me specify reoccurring icons for posts on the blog roll. Before I was copying them into each folder and titling them featured.jpg but now I can just set defaultImage='recipe.jpg' and it pulls it from the assets folder. I need to read more about the global resources and image processing because it didn’t do exactly what I wanted.
CHANGED how listitem.html partial handles setting the ‘featured’ image. This did, however, break the opengraph embeds which I still haven’t fixed.

January 5 2025

I have been working on figuring out the OpenGraph/embed stuff for a while but never made any progress. I finally realized what I was doing wrong. In my partial baseof.html I was including the internal template as opposed to my local OpenGraph template.

REMOVED {{ template "_internal/opengraph.html" . }} in baseof.html template
ADDED {{- partial "opengraph.html" . -}} in baseof.html template

The embeds are still not perfect, I’m working out what I need. I completely removed the entirety of the default opengraph.html partial and replaced it with a more simplified code.

  
  <meta property="og:type" content="website">
  <meta property="og:url" content="{{ $.Page.Permalink }}">
  
  {{- with or site.Title site.Params.title | plainify }}
  	<meta property="og:site_name" content="{{ . }}">
  	<meta property="twitter:site_name" content="{{ . }}">
  {{- end }}
  
  <meta property="og:title" content="{{ $.Page.Title }}">
  <meta property="og:description" content="{{ $.Page.Summary }}">
  <meta property="og:image" content="{{ .RelPermalink }}{{ .Params.featured_image }}">
  
  <meta property="twitter:domain" content="cyberbuffalo.neocities.org">
  <meta property="twitter:url" content="{{ $.Page.Permalink }}">
  <meta name="twitter:title" content="{{ $.Page.Title }}">
  <meta name="twitter:description" content="{{ $.Page.Summary }}">
  <meta name="twitter:image" content="{{ .RelPermalink }}{{ .Params.featured_image }}">

2024

December 26 2024

ADDED Hugo Video Shortcode to the site so I can embed locally hosted videos.

October 6 2024

I migrated my content over to the new theme structure. Things seem to be working just fine, with the exception of the summaries. I need to get the summaries to strip any previous formatting away.

CHANGED sidenav.html now includes code for a tag cloud. I like this better than just a straight list of tags. I have it set to only show tags with 2 or more uses. thanks to this site and the linked code.
FIXED {{ .Summary | truncate 240 | plainify }} plainify is the way we can strip away any formatting from a string.
ADDED responsive layout to the camera cards.

October 5 2024

There was a handful of bugs that I was trying to figure out when something happened to my site. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it forced my hand to sort of redo a few things that I’ve been putting off.

CHANGED The menus are now auto generated with the exception of HOME. Defined in the config file, sectionPagesMenu = 'main'
CHANGED Moved all of my created shortcodes into the theme folder.
CHANGED Moved all archetypes into the theme folder.
REMOVED the path to a potential featured image in the /Blog section so a default image would show up.
REMOVED featured image out of default front matter for cameras.
ADDED default_camera.jpg
ADDED pagination.html to the partials, based off of this page.
REMOVED summaryLength from hugo.toml, as it does not seem to work.
ADDED in list.html partial, {{ .Summary | truncate 240 }} in order to control the length of the summary.
FIXED The new menus so they are ordered correctly by removing sectionPagesMenu = 'main' in the config and instead defining the menus manually.

October 4 2024

CHANGED streamlined shortcodes/camera_info.html. Was using 3 different variables to convey 2 different strings of variables that could all be the same thing. All camera info is being pulled off the data list using the camera nickname/tag I.E. “olympusxa” as opposed to “camera1” and “olympusXA”.
CHANGED shortcode camera_info.html, now no value is needed in the shortcode to pull in the data from cameralist.yml.
CHANGED all names in cameralist.yml to the new, arbitrary nickname system. This will aid in pulling in information for the camera-used.html shortcode which I’m building for the galleries.

October 1 2024

CHANGED Fixed the view of the camera section. Did this by customizing list.html inside the layouts/cameras
CHANGED Also fixed the view when clicking through any of the specific camera categories to match. This was achieved by creating layouts/categories/taxonomy.html which is the same as cameras/list.html.
CHANGED the sorting of the list of cameras ByTitle instead of ByPublishDate
ADDED a cool rotation hover to the polaroid style cards in camera.
CHANGED fixed the “recent posts” to only show blog posts, excluding cameras & galleries. {{ range ( where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "blog" | first 3 ) }}

September 29 2024

ADDED Archetypes for all three categories, ‘Posts’, ‘Cameras’ & ‘Galleries’

August 18th 2024

ADDED changelog.md to the about section.
ADDED ‘{{ urlize }}’ to the camera_info.html template which adds a “-” in between spaces, making the taxonomies easier to interact with.
ADDED the actual changelog to the end of the about index.md
ADDED a photo to the about page :D

August 14th 2024

ADDED the cbtip.html shortcode, which will insert a cyberbuffalo tip into the page. to use the tip, sidetext= is for the text that goes on the lefthand side of the page, tip= is the tip itself.
ADDED got the codeblock to wrap text down by modifying the CSS for pre.

games | Killer7

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 11:07:36 -0800

I think my first Suda game was No More Heroes on the Wii. At the time I loved it for its “in your face” attitude, seemingly crude humor and avante garde presentation. It wasn’t until years later, well beyond playing all 4 games in that series did I gain a better understanding of what he and that game was doing. That revelation didn’t come with Lollipop Chainsaw or Killer is Dead, it was The Silvercase, a game that I played way too late into my obsession with all things Suda. I’m convinced that’s his favorite game, or maybe it’s his muse. He creates this thing that came out of that space in your mind, between cognizant thought and dreams, it improved on a pre-existing formula and presented it in a way that hadn’t been done before. Now every time he is looking to shake up subsequent games he goes back to The Silvercase for inspiration, or maybe it’s permission.

Killer7 Title Screen

Killer7 is unlike any game I’ve played before, it’s nothing like any games that came before it and no one has ever tried to make one since. Similar to the way Cowboy Bebop “becomes a new genre itself" this work, Killer7 created its own genre.

It may look like it has a formula, the best expectation is to expect nothing. It may seem like you are going from level to level with a stop at a mid boss before the big bad but this doesn’t always play out. Lollipop Chainsaw follows a pattern more clearly while No More Heroes ramps this up considerably. In K7 it’s more about punctuating a run-on sentence than providing you with a skill based challenge fight. Those ending scenes after the labyrinthian levels filled with paranormal characters chatting in your frontal lobe still provide impact, and they can still be challenging and memorable even though they aren’t “bosses with 3 patterns and multiple health bars” (In No More Heroes this is a repeated joke about how it’s time for the boss to transform, that is when someone else isn’t cutting Travis to take the fight on first).

Once the movement of K7 starts to become second nature, the systems of the game become really fun to navigate. You have a big map for each area with icons of different clues to the puzzles that need solving. Even though the maps are confusing, and they can get downright loopy, it’s not frustrating to chip away at the puzzles. There is freedom in not being able to move around these levels Willy-Nilly, something about the railed track of movement makes back and forth navigation almost easier. Because there is plenty of back and forth, especially when one of your personas die and Garcian needs to go on a retrieval mission.

Kaede in her natural form

This design of having separate “personalities” to control, each with their own unique abilities and weapons is like having a large party in an RPG that you can switch between at any time. Imagine if in Doom the pistol was controlled by Doom guy but the chainsaw swapped him out for a really angry woman who was always covered in blood. It’s more than just changing your weapon, your perspective will literally shift based on the character height, the reactions, the movement speed, it’s all be tweaked and tuned. The most interesting to me is Garcian, who exists to help you retrieve your failures. When you die, your personality falls, and while you can switch to another, sometimes you need a skill that only the dead possess. It’s up to you and Garcian to navigate the level and use the retrieval kit to bring the dead back to life. There is no XP gain, no loot or items waiting for you, just the keys to move forward.

Garcian on his way to fix things.

I could talk about this game for hours I think, I really want to write like 4000 words on this but I’ll leave that for someone with a better grasp on language. So I’ll say this: Killer7 is just fucking cool. Once you learn the moves, when you start to know the system, it plays unlike anything else. I love it, it’s brilliant, it’s fucking cool. The outlandish characters you meet, the anime cut scenes, the fact that you get to play as an old man in a wheelchair with the biggest video game gun I’ve ever seen fired while seated, it’s just full of new and surprising things that a 40 year old in the year 2023 hasn’t seen before, and that’s accounting for all the games that have come out since 2005.

Some additional reading on Killer7:

Killer7, “bad controls,” and the importance of friction in design

Great article by Andrew Lewis about the friction of the control scheme

cameras | Olympus Infinity Accura

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 18:49:46 +0000

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

Olympus

model

Accura Infinity

format

35mm

style

automatic

lens

38-80mm

aperture

f4.5-8.9

battery

2× AA or 1 CR123

exposure

Auto exposure

flash

built-in

focus

autofocus

iso-range

50-3200

iso-set

DX coding

self-timer

true

shutter

electronic shutter

shutter-type

electronic

Sample Galleries

Thoughts

I’m going to update this area with my thoughts later, and I’ll probably format this differently but I just wanted to have an area dogeared for that when the programming was done, which it nearly is!

Also I ripped these camera photos off the internet and will replace them with my own later on.

cameras | Olympus XA

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 18:49:46 +0000

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Camera Information:

Category

Information

maker

olympus

model

format

35mm

style

rangefinder

lens

F.Zuiko

addl

+1.5 stop exposure compensation

aperture

ƒ2.8-ƒ22

battery

1x 357 / SR44 / LR44

exposure-type

aperture priority

flash

accessory flashes available

focal-length

35mm

focus

manual focus with zone markings

iso-range

25-800

self-timer

true

shutter

leaf

Sample Galleries

Thoughts

Here are some random thoughts and reviews about this camera!

games | Asuras Wrath

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 09:15:36 -0700

Originally played by me in 2023, I’m compiling this review based on a series of discord messages sent to rappy as well as a small twitter thread. I’m going to try to present this as unedited as possible because the Discord messages in order were very good.

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 11:56 AM

Fuck it - Catrena's going to see Barbie today and then getting lunch, i'm a little hung over from ween last night

Its fucking Azura's Wrath time

LETS FUCKING GO

Something I've seen a lot of in regards to FF16 is "You wanted Asura's Wrath 2, you got FF16"

I already feel like I'm going to have an unhealthy obsession with this

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 12:02 PM

oh my god this game

Grand orchestral sadness? check

strange religions? double check

insane battles in space?? CHECK

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 12:09 PM

the art style of this game reminds me a bit of Fist of the North Star

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 12:19 PM

this game is laid out weird, it feels like it almost wants to be an anime first, a manga second and a video game third

(and that's not a dig, just an observation about formatting)

it also seems like they took hindu and buddhist philosophies and threw them into a blender

berserk, too. lots of berserk in here

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 1:33 PM

This is me to this game

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 3:18 PM

Lol I just got an achievement for interrupting a bosses speech called “Shut Up Wyzen”

Incredible

CYBERBUFFALO | Jul 29, 2023 3:34 PM

I just stopped a finger from god that was twice the size of earth, blew that deity into stardust and lava and in the process destroyed my arms

this is the most video game ass video game i've ever played and I fucking love it

its INSANE

anytime anyone says that QTEs are trash i'm going to force this game into their anus

because they rule

do we need them in Resident Evil games? Probably not. Do they work to get you mashing buttons in a face-off between you and a deity? absolutely.

CYBERBUFFALO | Aug 01, 2023 9:04 PM

I might be close to the end

I’m playing as Yasha AND Asura as we fly through space in the buddy mobile to kill giant Deus

The more I play this I’m wondering if this was released weekly or something

The chapters

Because they do a “next time on Asuras Wrsth” at the end and it’s like… dude I’m LITERALLY going to play it right now

So I’ve been skipping them

CYBERBUFFALO | Aug 02, 2023 2:52 PM

I rolled credits on Chapter 18 of Asura's Wrath last night and after the lengthy credit sequence, the tally of scores and showing me what we've unlocked, it informed me that there is indeed a TRUE ending that I was not privy to

and in order to obtain the true last chapter, I need to get S-rank on 5 chapters, or play at least 50 chapters total

and my smug ass was all "i've easily lapped up 5 s-ranks, losers"

and after getting the tally back from NASA, i indded fell short by 1 S-rank lol

so I'm going in to try to get an s-rank on one more so I can see the TRUE ENDING

CYBERBUFFALO | Aug 02, 2023 4:43 PM

DAMNNNN

DAMMMNNN

I knew that the stupid golden spider was going to come back into play here, but I did not expect THAT

Last night I kept asking "What about OLGA!?" and hoo boy

she gets fucking yeeted from the universe lmfao

Asura is LIam O'Brien of Griomoire Weiss and Critical Roll fame

Yasha is Robin Atkin Downes of TRAVIS TOUCHDOWN fame

Olga is Tara Strong of Juliet Starling (among a billion other things) fame

CYBERBUFFALO | Aug 04, 2023 4:59 PM

oh my god I'm playing the Asura's Wrath DLC and I just hit a story beat that was maybe some of the coolest and best storytelling I've seen in a game

holy shit the end of this DLC is incredible

Aug 5, 2023 / 10:33 pm

Maybe I’ve got a new unhealthy obsession and maybe it’s “Asura’s Wrath” which I just beat. Yes, I got the secret real ending. Yes, I played through the DLC chapters. And yes, I know what you’re going to say, it is loaded with QTEs but they rule and this game kicks so much ass. 🧵

Aug 5, 2023 / 10:33 pm

Now, I’ve never played a single .HACK game, nor do I know anything about Naruto, but the devs for AW primarily make those games. Its such a wacky track record, too. They also made Solatorobo so thats something. Apparently those in charge loved God Hand so much, they made Asura’s Wrath.

Aug 5, 2023 / 10:33 pm

Combat is snappy with light/heavy, counters, special moves & shooting mechs. I have a few issues but for the most part its a balls-to-the-wall action. When you do enough damage, your angry meter fills up & you get REAL angry, then kill everything in a QTE cutscene. Its so good!

Aug 5, 2023 / 10:33 pm

I never realized this game was formatted like an anime with bumpers, episodes & arcs. It also treats health in a cool way, refilling after each checkpoint. if you were to die & continue you’d have full health anyway, so just cut to the chase. Its a game that respects your time.

Aug 5, 2023 / 10:33 pm

It’s also just FUCKING BONKERS. A god plunges his sword through your chest and into the earth and it comes out the other side! A giant god tries to crush you with his finger and you STOP HIM. The planet tries to KILL YOU. And you have a best friend! His soundtrack fucking rules.

May 13, 2025 / 10:34 pm

Its so fun. There was a story arc that was done in such a way that it made me put my control down and reflect. Slow motion, black and white, it has STYLE and it knows how and when to use it. Go play this if you haven’t. Play it again even if you have. Find all the peeping toms!

games | Crusader of Centy

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:55:08 -0700

Originally played in 2023, I’m porting over my thoughts, first from a variety of messages sent in Discord to rappy as we played in tandem, and second from a small thread on twitter.

I am currently playing through Crusader of Centy on the NSO! Firstly my first off the cuff description of “LoZ but Earthbound” was not entirely accurate. Its medieval, it’s a very weird world, it’s like if some of the more tame enemies from Treasures’ Gunstar Heroes were in the zelda world. It has a lot of quirks to it, as well. You aren’t granted items/tools, you get various abilities that things can teach you, like jumping and lifting big objects, and it happens in like… the most random places. The other part of this is you also collect animals/party members. You’re able to assign 2 animals at a time that follow you around like Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow. These things augment your abilities in really specific ways; your movement doubles, your sword is ice powered but only when you throw it - two examples. My big worry when i realized how this was going to work was that you’d be swapping these animals in and out all the time, constantly in menus, but its designed pretty well and this hasn’t been troublesome at all. Some of these animal abilities are also passive, you just need to have them in your inventory and they’ll add something or other.

The game doesn’t give you a full overworld map, like a Zelda, that corresponds 1-to-1 to each square or quadrant, it’s more like Super Mario World where it shows each area and that you are in that area, just not specifically where you are. When you first go to a new area there will be a handful of screens you need to get through, things to do or puzzles to solve - and at first you think “fuck i"m going to have to backtrack through all of this” but the game does a good job about letting you skip things once they are finished off. Since there is no map and the areas are pretty expansive I find myself getting lost a lot, the areas can kind of all look the same after a while (there are only so many ways for them to vary the look of this desert).

My biggest complaint? The combat is terrible! I don’t know if its a hitbox issue, or strikebox or something, but your sword has an incredibly tiny area to cause damage. You know how sometimes, in AlttP, you’ll be standing up against grass or something and you swing your sword and it doesn’t cut it so you swing again and then it reacts? Like it was 1 pixel off. This game does that ALL. THE. TIME. So you have to be in a very specific position in relation to what you are attacking in order to do damage. When you get hurt, you are impervious for like .0005 seconds, but when you hit an enemy, they are invincible for like at least one full second, and the feedback on when you are getting hurt or when you are doing the hurting is not telegraphed very well. During one boss fight i didn’t think I got hit at all until I up and died in the middle of it - I was standing on spikes and didn’t know it.

Outside of that and then a few other “of the times things that only ALttP managed to figure out”, its pretty playable and enjoyable! I have a walkthrough up but I’m only reaching for it when I’m lost and need to figure out where to go next. Its not as obtuse as some other games and anytime i’ve been like “fuck what do I do next” I go to the nearest village and talk to people and either they said it earlier or their dialogue has changed. It’s actually a pretty weird game, I’m enjoying it!

Jul 13, 2023 / 9:50 pm

Crusader of Centy is finished and behind me! I really enjoyed it! It’s a different take on the 16 but action RPG. Imagine if instead of Zelda’s tools, you get party members but equipping them gave you the tools to progress! It’s interesting because you can combine them!

Jul 13, 2023 / 9:50 pm

The combat suffers a little as the sword has a terribly small area of effect so you have to be aligned just right to do damage. The game also wants you to throw your sword at all times, which makes you wonder why it feels so slow to throw.

Jul 13, 2023 / 9:50 pm

Combat issues aside, there is a really great world here full of weird little guys that want to hang out. There is also some philosophical questions raised that I loved. You ever feel bad for killing a couple of Bokoblins chilling by the fire in TOTK? We’ll this game’s for you!

Jul 13, 2023 / 9:50 pm

I liked this game so much I sprinted head first into … BEYOND OASIS! ANOTHER 16 bit Action Adventure game featuring weird little guys you collect!

Final Thoughts from 2025

I’ve thought about this game a few times since I’ve written these, and I’m glad I ported this over because it gave me time to properly reflect on a 16-bit game that did not shatter any earth for me. What it did do well, it did extremely well. Shaking up the tool-as-reward system and combining that with party members made this game feel surprisingly fresh. And using the monsters of this word to raise the question about who the real monster is - it’s a theme I think about all the time. Drakengard 3 does this exceptionally well as does Metal Gear Rising. It’s worth a shot if you’ve never played it before and possibly worth a second look since it’s very easily available on NSO.

games | Beyond Oasis

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:26:02 -0700

Originally played in 2023, I’m porting over my thoughts from a small thread on twitter.

Jul 13, 2023 / 10:07 am

And Beyond Oasis is finished too! Thank god! Damn this game has me tap dancing between loving it and hating it. I love the animation, the story is nonsense. The character design is incredible, sound design is nails on the chalkboard.

Jul 13, 2023 / 10:07 am

The combat is BY FAR my favorite part. imagine a deep beat ‘em up but w/swords. Secret combos, move inputs, different weapons to pick up & try. It’s like streets of rage 2, without grabs & throws. It’s very fun. It starts to fall apart with room sized bosses & tight play forming.

Jul 13, 2023 / 10:07 am

It also has weird little guys to collect!

[Here] is my biggest frustration. “Hey, you like the hook shot from Zelda!? Well you can only use it if you first find a mirror & only if your magic timer didn’t tick down. Oh & hopefully you also don’t want the beefcake fire genie as well.”

Jul 13, 2023 / 10:07 am

BUT it’s worth playing, especially a dual-play experience back2back with Centy. It’s easy to get lost in the well of well known 16bit ARPGs like Link to the Past and Secret of Mana, it’s nice to try some of the lesser known titles on a system that isn’t known for these games.

Thoughts from 2025

To this day I still haven’t found an action RPG with combat quite like Beyond Oasis. If you are curious about how Streets of Rage would feel as an action/adveture game, give this a shot. That sounds design though, still haunts my dreams.

games | Hi-Fi Rush

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 15:50:52 -0700

I first played Hi-Fi rush in February of 2023. I would have played it sooner but I was firmly implanted in the middle of Okami. January would see me travel to help my family with a rather serious surgery and once I returned home I start Hi-Fi Rush. This quick review was a series of tweets originally and I’m porting them over here for prosperity.

Feb 7, 2023 / 5:10 pm

Back on my bullshit! Could I pass this up? A rhythm based Hack & Slash on Game Pass? Sign me up jerks! If you thought I would gush over ‘Hi-Fi Rush’ because of its colorful art style, cartoonish sense of humor, unique combat & puzzles… you’d be right, this game fucking rules 🧵

yo!

Feb 7, 2023 / 5:10 pm

I really liked it. I thought the length was great (it is NOT 6 hours long, more like 10-12) plus there is a very meaty post-game. The post game is so engrossing that I really wish this was on the Switch. I’ve tried the remote play but the latency was too much to stay on rhythm.

Feb 7, 2023 / 5:10 pm

At first I thought this game was going to be annoying. But it turns out… its basically Futurama! You could replace Chai & Peppermint with Fry & Leela and it would work perfectly. It also has a splash of Monkey Island 1/2 thrown in there. It can be very funny!

Feb 7, 2023 / 5:10 pm

As a Hack & Slash, it checks all the boxes! It has an elevator sequence, a motorcycle-sequence style zipline, great bosses & air juggling combos! There’s a store to buy more moves and expansions as well. Its very well thought out! It even plays with scale and goes side-scrolling!

Feb 7, 2023 / 5:10 pm

Plus your sidekick is a black cat! 808 IS A BLACK CAT!!! Just go ahead and play this game, its awesome. Chai might retroactively get tossed onto the Year of the Hack & Slash mural.

Thoughts from 2025

I’ve dipped back into Hi-Fi Rush only a couple of times, both very briefly, since I wrote these posts. I enjoyed my initial play-through and should have more time for it to explore more of the postgame. To be perfectly honest, and this is going to sound privelaged and whiny, this game should have released on the Switch if they wanted me to grind things out. It could have been the perfect vehicle for this game. It’s currently on steam but I didn’t have a steamdeck at the time.

The writing was fun, the character designs are great, it really sticks with the conceit of “character action but rhythm” and never wavers. Plus, seriously don’t make me say it again, 808 is a black cat!!!!!

games | Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:30:00 -0700

Originally played in 2023, I’m porting over my thoughts, first from a variety of messages sent in Discord to rappy as we played in tandem, and second from a small thread on twitter.

Out of nowhere, a small team within Platinum brought the mature, sexy, long legged Bayonetta into the pages of a storybook, and it worked out perfectly. With the combat sitting somewhere between Bayonetta 3 and Astral Chain, the game has you controlling Cereza for light platforming and puzzle solving, while your demon Cheshire protects and fights. I loved the combat & environment, the art style was great and the story was good. While I call this an action RPG - which I do think is appropriate - it also share some DNA with top-down Zelda games while also crossing into Metroidvania territory. There is backtracking, areas are gated off until you get the next item/upgrade, you will be presented with areas early that you won’t be able to access until later - all the genre hits.

Its a good presentation, and really, the combat is very fun and cool. It also fixes one of my biggest complaints with Bayonetta. Say you are ass deep in a level, you stumble across an Alfheim/Muspelheim room (If you don’t know these are secret challege rooms -don’t get hit, witch time damage only, etc etc), if you beat them you get upgrades (magic or health). If you are struggling you have to either finish them or move on, and if you want to come back to them you have to go through the entire level. In Bayonetta Origins you’re able to select these challenge rooms from a menu, a small but important improvement.

It also invokes one of my absolute biggest pet peeves. Let me present you with a word problem:

You have 5 health potions at a checkpoint right before a boss fight. You fight the boss and use two potions. You die, and get sent back to the checkpoint, how many health potions should you have?

Five! The answer is five, not 3, Bayonetta Origins. This kind of thing drives me nuts, especially in auto-save games that don’t let you choose different checkpoints to go back to; otherwise you can get stuck in a fight that maybe you aren’t able to finish because your potions are gone.

Apr 20, 2023 / 8:29 pm

Finished off Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon! I took a small hiatus to join in the zelda hype & jump into BotW again. Which is funny because this is zelda-like in its progression. I REALLY liked this game. its an interesting mash of multiple Platinum games.

Apr 20, 2023 / 10:19 pm

I had played the demo in Bayo3, thought it was cute, decided to buy & stopped paying attention to it. So getting this game & realize it was a small Zelda-like mixed with asymmetric combat was a pleasant surprise. You control Cereza and the Demon Cheshire separately!

Apr 20, 2023 / 10:25 pm

The combat gets involved & deep, lots of options for combos. I feel they held back the complexity not just for the younger audience but because it can get confusing when you have to run everyone in opposite directions. But for the most part it worked without question.

Apr 20, 2023 / 10:26 pm

The visuals are phenomenal. It has a water color, painterly quality that goes between story book & psychedelic 1970s op art. Lots of silhouettes, monochromatic splashs, akin to the hallucinations in 2001. The story takes some weird turns as well, and gets DARK QUICK! Play this!!

Final Thoughts

This game is unique and weird. I like that a lot of the talent at PlatinumGames has been used to nurture these small projects and unique gameplay mechanics. Despite what may or may not be going on at that company, you can’t deny that even with their current brain drain situation, their output is almost always still worth taking a look at. Yes, even their very underated - and very dead - mobile game - which I’m still hoping gets re-sold as a complete game on console, or their overlooked GAAS Babylon’s Falls - something even I didn’t try, though I didn’t have very long to make the move. But this game shouldn’t be used only as a frame for the story that PG is dead or dying. It exposed new talent, a great team that took some chances and delivered a really unique game with a control scheme that should be impossible to play but works so well. You really need to think about each hand as its own character, they each have their own tasks to accomplish, enemies to fight, platforms to traverse. They are working together, completely apart. And it works beautifully. I hope this is not the last we see from this team, and I hope PlatinumGames can continue to thrive - even if we have to suffer through another round of mobile games and free-to-play, online service games just to get another Bayonetta: Origins or the next experiment brought to market it’s going to be worth it.

Additional Images

games | God of War (2018)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 10:13:02 -0800

In 2022 I decided to only play hack and slash games, in whatever order i saw fit to connect any threads I wanted to explore. This is one of the games I played during The Year of the Hack and Slash! I’m porting over this post which originally appeared as a thread on twitter in 2022.

Dad of War

As the year of the Hack & Slash comes to a close, I turned my sights to my new (to me) PS4 Pro, and a game that has received not only critical acclaim, but a critically acclaimed sequel. After playing GoW3 I needed to experience the follow-up to one of my least like games this year. I needed to see how the murdering, rage-filled monster Kratos, was turned into the darling of the AAA gaming industry.

When picking this game up at Gamestop the clerk said “This game is amazing, the stuff you can do with that axe is incredible.” I was already intrigued to see how we could take a mass-murderer and put him into a situation where I was to feel sympathetic towards his dad duties, but this line cinched it for me. The axe. In all the H&S games I played this year, I don’t think there has been one where an Axe was your central weapon. There were axes that you could switch into, but generally the starting weapon was a sword. The mechanic at the forefront of GoW4 is being able to throw the axe than retrieve it, much in the same way that Thor is able to call back his fabled hammer.

First, the axe throwing mechanic is flawless. It feels good to pull of a headshot or take the legs of a draugr out. But the game leans on this for enemies and puzzles, and since its basically the only mechanic, it wore out its welcome. Imagine a Zelda game where all you had was the boomerang.

The combat is okay. I found the way the camera attaches itself to Kratos in a weird way. You always face forwards, so if you pull back on the stick he just kind of jogs backwards. It leads to being vulnerable to enemies. Enemies, too, seem to be glued to Kratos, as he dodges their noses always face you, so unless you dodge perfectly to slow down time you’ll get hit anyway.

20 hours into the main campaign a regular, scripted story encounter with just medium level grunts put my ass into the ground because in order to upgrade your armor you need to do sidequests to pull in the enormous amounts of material. But the sidequests were so dull and same-y that I decided early on I wanted to skip them, so I kind of screwed myself.

The story is good, but its filled with so much Gen-X sad dad angst that some moments of poignancy were met with jaded groans. Riding around the boat and listening to Mimir tell stories about mythical fathers and sons felt forced. I get it, Kratos has daddy issues, just put your hand on your sons shoulder for god sakes.

And then, the story just sort of … ended. Chekhov’s Thor? Chekhov’s Odin? DOES NOT APPLY. I guess they were saving them for the next game. Kratos and Boy do finish the main part of their journey so we get a little closure, but still a lot of doors are left open.

I’m trying to hide my disappointment with this game but it really felt like a chore to get through. The controls, the combat, the convoluted upgrade system, it all felt like AAA bloat. This could have easily been a streamlined game with a linear path, a tight 20 hour experience that could have had more impact.

My last complaint, in the first hour of GoW 3, I fought a few bosses, some giants, some gods, crazy deities. In this game, I’ve really only had 2 boss fights, I guess three. But there are a ton of troll or elemental fights, and they are exactly the same every single time so it feels extremely repetitive. On the other side of this, Catrena told me this was one of her favorite games to WATCH me play this year, because it really is like a giant blockbuster. She liked the characters and the drama they are putting on, so it at least has that going for it. After all, it really does look phenomenal.

games | Fire Emblem Warriors

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 01:01:15 -0800

Kicking off the last month in the Year of the Hack & Slash with a game/series that I didn’t anticipate playing, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes! @AbraCatrena and I have been co-op’ing this & its been a great time! Lots of depth to everything BUT the combat. 🧵

Dec 5, 2022 / 1:41 am

If ever you thought “Gee Three Houses would rule if it weren’t for all that TURN BASED STRATEGY” then do I have good news for you! Its the same game. The story may be new but everything is there from 3H. Tea Time, character management, the class system, supports, crests, et all

Dec 13, 2022 / 9:26 am

Last night we wrapped Three Hopes! Due to a series of misfortunate choices we got the bad ending. There was 1 chapter that determined the ending & some rogue NPC made the error to kill someone & boom - bad ending because I didn’t bother creating two saves. OH WELL!

Dec 13, 2022 / 9:26 am

Three Houses was the first FE game I ate whole. Catrena & I would spend nights for months strategizing, dating, having tea, leveling up. The gameplay loop just clicked. Its fitting this would be the first Warriors game that made us do the same. The H&S combat is secondary.

Dec 13, 2022 / 9:26 am

We will come back to it for Dmitri’s route, but for now we’re going to walk away from this, feeling slightly unsatisfied by the ending we got, but ultimately happy to have spent time in this world with these characters (and the kick-ass music) again.

games | God of War 3

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 11:23:35 -0800

The Man Before The Dad

With the arrival of Thanksgiving, fall is officially coming to a close which means its time to wrap up The Autumn of 3s! The next hack & slash that bookends a trilogy played was God of War 3 & boy do I have opinions! This is going to be my first God of War game so I really didn’t know what to expect. After watching a story recap of 1 & 2, I STILL was unprepared for the tone of this game.

GoW 3 is a brutal, unrelenting violent romp that takes that makes viciousness a central character. Kratos’ brutality is his defining feature, be it ruthlessly cutting down helpless humans caught in the wake of a war they have no say in, or killing Hera with a twist of his hand in her garden because she was mean to him. I understand he opened Pandora’s box, but to play as the personification of the terrors that plague man is just not what I was prepared for. Basically, Kratos is a huge dick. This game had a much more cinematic story than most of the other games I’ve played on this list, I imagine Santa Monica Studios has plenty of talented hollywood storytelling folk at their disposal, and they crafted a well written narrative, its just that I didn’t care for it. There were also some tremendously gross story moments, like being forced to perform QTE actions to have sex with aphrodite and killing the helpless, topless ‘poseidon princess.’ Those moments are weird and left a bad taste in my mouth. Catrena described them as “superficial gamer-boy fantasies” and I couldn’t agree more. They were unnecessary and felt out of place.

Another moment of note, and I haven’t fully decided if i liked it, after fighting poseidon it switched into a first person view from Poseidon’s perspective, but you still control Kratos and have to continue beating him. Then, a QTE pops up and its L3+R3 and you gouge out his fricking eyes! THE EYES YOU AS THE PLAYER ARE CURRENTLY PLAYING FROM. Just brutal. (Killer is Dead would do something similar to this for an entire boss fight 3 years later.)

For Poseidon!!!

The combat is great, its way deeper than I had imagined it was going to be. You get 4 weapons, each with a magic ability, specials and combos. I like the enemy grab mechanic, it offer some variety to combat. The series obviously had some influence on other games in the genre. GoW was able to take the fighting giant monsters at scale thing and make a defining feature. Bayonetta certainly took some ideas from GoW after GoW took ideas from DMC.

Lets get this out of the way right now, God of War 3 has the best goddamned flashlight in any game. After fighting Helios, you reach down and tear his fucking head off with your bare hands, and then clip it to your belt. When you need to see in the dark you pull out the screaming head of a god that blasts light out of its sad eyes and mouth.

This has been my PS4 background for 3 years

Lastly, I just cannot understand how we go from Kratos brutally killing the entire Parthenon to Dad of the Decade. I’m going to play GoW 2018 to find out, but until then I need to take some time off from this scumbag. Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, if you celebrate!

Thoughts from the Future

As I reflect on this game through screenshots, most of what I wrote holds true. I think I’ve turned the corner on gouging out Poseidon’s eyes, I think that was actually incredibly fucking cool. Look, Kratos can be brutal and unwavering in his sympathies, he’s a man hell bent on revenge. But there has to be a limit to that revenge otherwise you are clearly just a monster. It’s the Scarface paradox. Most of what happened to him was his own fault because he’s such a GD asshole! The same can be said for Kratos, too. But It’s understandable why this is the way he is, just look at the source! Combat was great, visuals were great, the flashlight fucking rules, but Kratos is too much of a dick for his own good.

games | Onimusha: Warlords

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 17:52:01 -0700

In 2022 I decided to only play hack and slash games, in whatever order I saw fit to connect any threads I wanted to explore. This is one of the games I played during The Year of the Hack and Slash! I’m porting over this post which originally appeared as a thread on twitter in 2022.

I started another Hack & Slash in the wake of Drakengard 3. I didn’t know what to do next, as I’m not ready for Drakengard 1 or Nier Replicant. I saw a Capcom sale on the switch & grabbed Onimusha: Warlords! You can tell right away this was another proposed Resident Evil game! 🧵

Title Screen

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:10 pm

I’m around 1/2way through, and its exactly what I needed. Its not a 7-course tasting menu of emotions, rather a quick bite by a good chef. The combat is tight & it won’t outstay its welcome (around 5hrs). That’s not to say its fluff, because it gets intense with the story.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:10 pm

It has lots of Resident Evil in it. You get weird relics that unlock doors, you’re in this dilapidated Japanese mansion. There are trap puzzle rooms, medallions needed to unlock doors, demons with long tongues. Hell there’s even a room full of tanks that enemies bust out of!

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:10 pm

Hey I know you!

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

You have been defeated, Evil Samanosuke!

Get wrecked, bro.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

Its easy to forget this is a PS2 game thats been uprezed.

So you kill a huge insect queen after a long unskippable cut scene, forget to heal and accidentally trigger another boss battle before saving then die and it all comes back. Yeah, this game is 20 years old.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

Back to the boathouse! Yes, I would like to climb the ladder. Yes, I would also like to use this boat. Yes please for the love of god I would like to not have to try to beat this boss 3 more times.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

I complain but it wasn’t really that bad. It would have been annoying back then, as much as it was now, but it was not a deal breaker. In fact, after the ending cut-scene of this game, I would say its quirks are absolutely worth putting up with.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

And I missed something about the combat! It does get a bit deeper, as there is an entire block, parry and ‘flash’ attack system that I wasn’t privy to. It’s hard to do, but instead of dodging right before an attack, YOU counter attack before getting hit for an issen-strike.

Aug 21, 2022 / 7:15 pm

Another game down! If you’re a fan of Samurai and also Resident Evil what are you doing? go play this! It’s also worth it for the bonkers and ultra violent final cut-scene which came out of left field. If you aren’t going to play it look it up and watch it, its awesome.

Aug 22, 2022 / 7:21 pm

Another thing re: Onimusha- the music is CRAZY. Apparently they hired the New Japan Philharmonic, cited as up to 200 pieces. So you’ll be standing in this broke-ass mansion, just doing nothing and this incredible score is swelling behind you. It’s amazing

games | Devil May Cry

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 12:45:39 -0800

I’m playing a few games right now, but next in the Year of the Hack ’n’ Slash is a doozy… Devil May Cry! I chickened out and got the HD collection on Series X as instead of using my PS2, but I forgive me. And as it turns out, I’ve got feelings about this game.

Jun 8, 2022 / 12:48 pm

I’m about 3/4 of the way through. For a PS2 game that’s been upped to HD, it looks GREAT! It’s just a cool game, kind of the way I imagine a (good) 3D Castlevania would look. It’s got an air of mystery to it and handles the vagueries of a haunted castle ambiance pefectly.

Jun 10, 2022 / 8:39 am

That’s a wrap on DMC! By the end I was in love. It’s everything I love from games like this; attitude, fast action, baffling story and HARD bosses! I spent 4 hrs on the last 3 chapters, the difficulty really ramps up, which rules cause you fight gods for the fate of the universe!

Jun 10, 2022 / 8:48 am

Here’s a secret… I’m terrible at these games. BUT this game clicked at a point and I was able to go from a C/D student to B, but the final areas were challenging so making it through was a triumph! I AM tempted to go back on Hard and see how far I get! But for now Im moving on!

games | Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory

Sun, 15 May 2022 22:29:51 -0800

The next game in my Year of the Hack ‘N’ Slash is a PSP game called Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory! And it’s pretty weird! I mean just watch this clip from the intro cutscene - it has everything I love in a games story, depressed robots, androids questioning existence and guns protruding out of robot skulls!

The gist of the game is this - You are are an android named A.D.A.M. and for some reason you’ve decided you aren’t like other robots, and therefore you must climb this tower, reluctantly killing other robots while questioning all of your motives.

You have 5 loadout slots, Head, L/R arm, Chest and Legs. You mix and match weapons/armor to create a custom build that suits your liking. Blade weapon with support guns, all guns, etc. You pick up skin elixer to increase your stats, slots, etc. You get weapons and elixir as drops from enemies. One of the unique features is called the Overkill - when you deplete an enemies health, it starts counting up the damage you do afterwards. The more damage, the better the drop rate becomes.

You also grind up extra weapons you don’t want into elixir. This is where the risk/reward comes into play. When you die you lose all of your equipped items (never to be recovered) and get sent back to the 1st floor. Anything left in inventory can be equipped at the next terminal.

Buttt… you can also cheese it when you die and just restart the game from your last save point. This saves some considerable slog. Now to get back to climbing that tower! We’ve got to save the soul of this robot android.

I got to the top of the tower - YAY! A random voice told me to git gud and come back later - BOO! I’m back on the first floor, all maps of the random levels reset, gear/progress intact. wondering if this will turn into a “all bosses before last boss” thing. Spoiler, it didn’t. Its more of the same over and over again.

That’s a wrap on Rengoku! I finished my final assault on the tower. This game took about 10 hours to roll credits. While it was fun, it never showed you anything new after you got used to core gameplay loop. Bosses were the same as regular enemies, just with pumped up stats.

The best part about this game, was the ending was you leaving the tower, then sprouting a giant pair of fucking wings and flying your free ass into the sunset. It was like the fantasy ending of Brazil but without the rug being pulled out from underneath the protagonist.

Thoughts from 2025

I ported this writeup over from my twitter archive tonight because I saw someone post the cover on bluesky and the replies were genuine surprise. It doesn’t seem as though this game is that popular, which I supposed isn’t that much of a surprise. I’ve posted about it before because that intro video is just so sick, literally like nothing else out there. The sequel was pretty convoluted when I tried it and I’m wondering if more people had tried to play that, thus the originality of the first is getting left behind.

I would be as bold as to call this the El Shaddai of the PSP. What do I mean by that? It’s a unique game, that looks and plays like nothing else with writing that sits on the cerebral level. It shares a lot of themes with NieR: Automata, one of my favorite games, so anyone looking for a bite-sized romp through a tower of sad robots that you can kill more than 100% than give this a shot.

games | Killer Is Dead

Fri, 06 May 2022 19:05:00 -0800

Killer is Dead is next up for the year of the Hack & Slash! The only thing I know about this game is that it is NOT part of the Suda51 “Kill the Past” series directly, but could be helpful to play through before jumping into Travis Strikes again and NMH3.

Right out the gate I’m devouring the tone of this game. It’s dialogue is vague, the visuals are often obscured in shadows and everyone is hot, but also odd and sad, like an Ingmar Bergman film. The combat is snappy and fun and seems to have a lot of depth to it.

This game RULES. The combat is ferocious and unlike Scarlet Nexus, it throws tons of enemies at you, letting you go nuts. When your combo gets high enough you move even faster and a prompt comes up for a finisher. Depending on your choice, you get bonus health, blood or xp.

Not unlike Killer7 (but not exact) you absorb enemy blood & use it for instakills and ammo for your cybernetic arm (blaster/charged shot/freeze/drill). The instakills are fast and responsive, allowing continuous use, causing you to fly around a room just splaying dudes in half.

okay HOLD THE GD PHONE. Hidden in the levels of this game are sexy ladies and you have to DATE THEM. Not only are you dating them, but you have creep on their bits when they aren’t looking in order to build up your blood and then you give them gifts. LMFAO this is one of the funniest mini-games I’ve seen in a HnS yet. And yes, if you get your love level up high enough than you go behind closed doors, so to speak.

Enough pervy bits (of which there’s lots!) I’ve got to talk about this intense boss. She clones herself & if you attack the wrong one it switches into the first person view OF THE BOSS KILLIN YOU with wretched hands. You still run around fighting, but the camera is the boss’ eyes.

This game has so much atmosphere built into it, I’m enjoying just soaking it up. The dialogue can be so vague for most of it but then you’ll hesitantly kill someone and Mondo will say something with a punch like “The moon is now full of malice” and IT MAKES TOTAL SENSE SOMEHOW.

I’ve used the term vague a few times to discuss the story and it’s really the most fitting. Everyone is floating through an Ambian sleepwalk, they aren’t listening to one another and anyone could start screeming at any moment, and it never feels out of place or forced.

I’ve rolled credits on this and while there are some achievements I’m still going to get, I’m going to call this one done. Killer is Dead will stick with me, from the action to the characters to the pervy bits. It’s made its way to the top of my list of games so far this year.