Generations Revisited

Generations Revisited

One of the things that you learn about me pretty early on is that I am prone to doing nonsense things.  One of those recent things has been trying to get the Citra 3DS emulator up and running to see how well Monster Hunter games work on it.  One of the things that I have wanted for awhile is for the ability to play the older handheld monster hunter games with a proper controller and on a larger non-handheld screen.  Yes I realize this literally goes against everything about the 3DS as a console platform, but I secretly wish that Nintendo would release something similar to the PSTV that is essentially a 2DS that hooks up to your television.  Similarly…  I pretty much exclusively play the switch in docked mode with a pro controller so maybe the whole handheld experience is lost on me.

Citra is an emulator that tries really hard to skirt that line between legal and illegal by forcing users to dump significant amounts of base information from a 3DS unit running a custom firmware.  I am not going to talk about this process, nor am I going to talk about the other ways around this process, but suffice to say that installing Citra is just the first step in many along this path that most assuredly leads to madness.  I’ve seen some stuff…  that is all I can say about that.  Which is made even more insane when you realize that I have a 2DS XL and a 3DS XL with the Monster Hunter Generations Cartridge that I can play easily any time I want to boot it up.

Generations Revisited

Emulation has always intrigued me…  especially once you enter the realm of 3D games because generally speaking if you have enough horsepower you can run the games in a way nicer state than you can on the original device.  For example I am running Citra at 3 times the resolution of a native 3DS at 1200×720 which graphically still looks a little dated by way sharper than things do on the handheld itself.  This also allows me to do things like take screenshots…  which is something I find myself sorely missing when I am playing on the actual proper handheld systems.  There was in theory a way to do this through MiiVerse that has now been shuttered, and the only other way I believe is through a capture card that generally costs about $200 to get installed.  In theory there is a custom firmware option as well, but I am sorta afraid to do that on my primary system.

The trickiest bit of the configuration that I had was getting Citra to recognize my Xbox One controller inputs.  There is a standard push key to configure button type interface, but for whatever reason it was not actually recognizing input.  After some googling I found a work around which was to take someone else’s direct-input controller config and paste it into my configuration file.  For the curious this file lives in “C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\Citra” or more quickly you can just type %appdata% into the run prompt to get at least to the roaming directory.  Inside of the Config directory there should be a file labelled “qt-config.ini” and at the top of that is a controls block.

[Controls]
pad_a=65
pad_b=83
pad_x=90
pad_y=88
pad_l=81
pad_r=87
pad_zl=49
pad_zr=50
pad_start=77
pad_select=78
pad_home=66
pad_dup=84
pad_ddown=71
pad_dleft=70
pad_dright=72
pad_cup=73
pad_cdown=75
pad_cleft=74
pad_cright=76
pad_circle_up=16777235
pad_circle_down=16777237
pad_circle_left=16777234
pad_circle_right=16777236
pad_circle_modifier=68
pad_circle_modifier_scale=0.4000000059604645
button_a=”button:1,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_b=”button:0,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_x=”button:3,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_y=”button:2,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_up=”joystick:0,engine:sdl,direction:up,hat:0″
button_down=”joystick:0,engine:sdl,direction:down,hat:0″
button_left=”joystick:0,engine:sdl,direction:left,hat:0″
button_right=”joystick:0,engine:sdl,direction:right,hat:0″
button_l=”button:4,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_r=”button:5,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_start=”button:7,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_select=”button:6,engine:sdl,joystick:0″
button_zl=”engine:keyboard,code:49″
button_zr=”engine:keyboard,code:50″
button_home=”engine:keyboard,code:66″
circle_pad=”engine:sdl,axis_y:1,joystick:0,axis_x:0″
c_stick=”engine:sdl,axis_y:4,joystick:0,axis_x:3″
motion_device=”engine:motion_emu,update_period:100,sensitivity:0.01,tilt_clamp:90.0″
touch_device=engine:emu_window

Simply paste over this configuration and you should be good to go.  You might want to tweak the sensitivities in game a bit because right now my Xbox One controller is way the hell more responsible than a stock 3DS.

Generations Revisited

All in all I am pretty happy with the results and while sure… I could be playing Monster Hunter World on the PS4 instead of messing around with Citra and Monster Hunter Generations…  that is not the way my brain works.  Sure the menus are all very pixelated and sure the textures look wonky at times…  but the base 3D models look so much smoother than they do on the console.  I have no clue why I suddenly feel the desire to play all the things when it comes to Monster Hunter…  but I am likely going to try and get the PSP game running on my PSTV to see how that one handles as well.  The risk of a post like this is that I am likely going to start getting a bunch of comments asking me how I did this and if I can send them files…  the answer is a big nope.  I am existing in a weird grey area in that I have all of the components needed to make this work naturally.

You know how all of those videos will say “this is for educational purposes only”, in truth that is sorta why I think I mess around with stuff like this.  I know soon I will get bored and wander off as the next shiny thing attracts my attention, because I am no longer playing Monster Hunter Online or Phantasy Star Online 2…  things I had to go through a bunch of work to make functional.  I think I like doing these silly ventures because it feels like I accomplished something interesting.  Its the core part of my brain that used to always keep changing Linux Distros on a second machine here at the house, because ultimately I guess I have a strong tinkerer instinct.

Mythical Nonsense

Once again I do not have an awful lot to talk about this morning.  I’ve been having some insanely detailed dreams the last few nights.  For example this past night I was in an office building that they purposefully hid the elevator in, and I remember thinking in the dream that this is so bizarre given that most buildings essentially direct you there.  The reason why it was hidden is because each time you shifted between floors you shifted between decades in time, so as you traveled up you were going back in time.  Essentially the staircase was of the utmost prominence in the building because if you rode the elevator up, taking the stairs back down allowed you to exit the building that existed in that time.  This is one of those cases that most of my dream was consumed on the setup of this premise and then we never actually did much of anything with it because the alarm went off.  The thing is I either tend to have no memorable dreams at all… or wildly vivid ones like this one.

As far as gaming news… I spent most of my night working on either faction in Argus or catching up my Orc Deathknight.  One of the things that happened yesterday is that more or less we assembled a team of mythical madness.  At this very moment it looks like we have…

  • Protection Paladin
  • Unholy Death Knight
  • Mistwalker Monk
  • Fury Warrior
  • Frost Mage

While a little heavy on the melee that sounds like a perfectly reasonable group as far as I am concerned for pushing Mythics.  I originally had planned on playing my Orc Warrior which is my best geared character…  but then that would have lead us to have two Fury warriors.  As a result I swapped to my Death Knight to in theory provide a bit of battle rezzing if we need it.  In theory this is going to work I think… we just need to sort out a good time to actually start.  The thought is a one night a week thing and start pushing up keys as far as we can get them.  The idea is to ease into this so we don’t need a ringer, and in theory maybe get some gear along the journey.

This is honestly as close to raiding as I think I want to do for now, and I am interested to see how this process goes.

 

Nothing Much to Say

Nothing Much to Say

This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things.  The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something…  do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out.  The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding.  At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions.  At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.

I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route.  As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde…  not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus.  Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one.  There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other…  for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area.  Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point…  with ways to get there quickly.  Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.

Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could.  So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission.  I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side.  Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.

As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit.  The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now.  The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great.  The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more.  I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is.  Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.

I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it.  I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story.  Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead.  Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same.  Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.

The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor.  We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs.  Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on.  Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening.  Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.

 

Reading Challenge #80: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

I’m continuing at a steady pace with my reading challenge. I’ve just finished reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. This book was published in 1995, and adapted into a broadway musical in 2003.

If you have somehow avoided the presence of this work in popular culture, it can be summed up as a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Like the source material, this work is  political. Unlike the source material, Wicked is not a children’s story.
Spoilers Ahoy!

The book starts far removed from the events of the original, before even the Wicked Witch of the West is born. We get to see her parents, their passions and faults, and how that shaped her childhood. The Witch Elphaba’s skin was green from birth, not some attribute of her witchiness. In fact we learn later that it is probably the result of having parents from two different worlds, even though neither her mother nor biological father was green. That green otherness influenced the whole path of her life. We see that in her childhood her father used it to try to win religious converts.

By the time she was off to school she is ill-equipped to navigate the social structure among the other young girls. Her relationship with her roommate, Galinda, starts of fairly antagonistic but does eventually become something warmer. During their time at school, Elphaba becomes interested in Animal rights. In Oz, animals are normal beasts, but Animals have consciousness and sentience. This has social and political implications since the Wizard has started slowly stripping Animals of their rights and displacing them out of society. We start to see the direct impacts of the Wizard’s rule. Elphaba and several friends from the boys’ section of the school work together to help Dr. Dillamond, a Goat, try to show that there is no inherent difference between Animals and humans. Their hope is that if they can show this to the Wizard he will stop treating them so poorly. Sadly the Goat professor is murdered before he can complete his work.

At this point Elphaba, her sister Nessarose, and Glinda are summoned to a meeting with their school headmistress, Madame Morrible. She attempts to conscript them into sorcerous service in the name of the Wizard. She also was the one who had Dr. Dillamond killed. They try to take Dr. Dillamond’s evidence directly to the Wizard, but fail to make any impact. Elphaba becomes radicalized at this point and leaves to join a resistance movement against him, while her sister and friend seemingly fall into the roles Morrible set out for them.

While she is working for the resistance, Elphaba has an affair with Fiyero, who she knew from school. He ends up murdered at the hands of the Wizard’s enforcers because of it. Much of the rest of the book is Elphaba’s journey seeking forgiveness from Fiyero’s family, and slow acceptance of what happened and what the consequences were. For me that is where the heart of this story lies. Why do we have such a need for absolution? How can we give it to others when we can’t for ourselves? Why does it drive us to hope for impossible things?

In the end it is the audacity of innocent Dorothy, asking for forgiveness for the death of Nessarose, that leads to the death of the Witch of the West. Now Dorothy has killed both sisters, and must go out into the world with no one left to offer forgiveness for it. Elphaba saw herself in Dorothy, and it makes you wonder what will become of her now.

I greatly enjoyed this book. My biggest complaint has to do with timing. We have a long time to see the life that led Elphaba to become the Wicked Witch. However that final transition into the part of the story that lines up with the original feels a bit jagged. Perhaps the author has made her too sympathetic, so that by the end I had a hard time reconciling the relatively quick shift to her full Witchdom. Even though you know how this story ends before it even begins, you end up exhausted and heartbroken when you get there.

TL;DR: A wicked re-telling of the Oz story. Absolutely worth the read.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Rating: 4/5 stars

Next up: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury