March 2018 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Generations Revisited

March 30, 2018 by Belghast

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.

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.

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

March 29, 2018 by Belghast

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

March 28, 2018 by Belghast

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.

Bad Grind Good Grind

March 27, 2018 by Belghast

I am still reeling a bit from a dream I had over night. I guess in theory you could call it a nightmare, where I ended up leaving my current job and ending back under the yoke of the one boss in my work history that I hated working for. I’ve always been one of those people who tended to naturally get along with bosses. Pending they are coming from a place of logic, I get why they want the things they want… and especially now as a “boss” myself I get how orders that seem disconnected from reality end up having to be passed down. This boss however was petty and vindictive and gave me nothing but a constant stream of conflicting information. If I did what I thought was right… he would rail on me for not doing it however the hell he wanted me to do it. If I stopped and asked for directions in how he wanted me to do a thing… he would rail on me for not taking initiative. In the end it was two and a half years of the lowest point in my career that did some serious damage to my psyche that I am apparently still sorting out.

On the gaming front however I have been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft, mostly because I want to unlock the two Allied races that I have yet to. Let me take a moment to talk about how much bullshit the way these races are unlocked is. Primarily that it is grossly unfair that two races for a single faction are unlocked by doing content that has been in game more or less since the launch of Legion, and the other two gated behind the newest content and honestly the most frustrating to do. So I have the two horde races of the High Mountain Tauren and the Nightfallen unlocked and a monk and rogue create respectively. Now I am working on the frustrating rep grind that is roaming around Argus and doing daily quests barely watching the needle climb at all.

Argus just feels bad and was only slightly improved when I got the reputation to unlock the improved flight whistle. Why in the hell this was not a default thing makes zero sense to me. I get that they rushed this content out the door and did a lot of visual tricks that are easily dispelled the second you lift off the ground. However the constant tug of war of achieving flying only to have it arbitrarily taken away from you is maddening. We experienced this with Pandaria and then suddenly losing the ability to fly on the Timeless Isle and Isle of Giants and in both cases it felt horrible. Having a speed bump in the form of Argus still feels horrible… but I am gritting my teeth and dealing with it for the sake of racial unlocks. As to why this suddenly matters to me now? I have no clue… it could have been simply spurred on by having access to the races in Alpha.

The other game I have been playing a significant amount of lately is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on my new pokeball edition 2DS XL. Unfortunately the shut down of MiiVerse and the lack of having any sort of a native screenshot functionality will keep me from actually capturing any shots of my gameplay. However this has sorta become my evening retreat as I chill out doing some monster hunter from bed before finally heading to sleep. I find having some sort of a wind down activity helps a lot and at least thus far this fits the bill nicely. I do however have a USB to 3DS charging cable at work so I might start taking this with me and playing a little over lunch now that I am getting into some of the more exciting activities.

I’ve not made it terribly far but at this point I have taken down two monsters: Velicidrome and Seltas… both of which I need several more parts from. I have the mission to hunt the Great Jaggi so I am likely to attempt that next because I need a single hide to upgrade my current sword and shield. Not sure why I have not broken out my beloved Longsword yet, but for the moment I opted to stick to the starter weapon. In truth in Monster Hunter World, the Sword and Shield is probably my second favorite of the weapons so I am in part using MH4U as a way to get more familiar with its quirks.

How quickly I have taken to this game in the relatively short amount of time I have been playing it… tells me that Monster Hunter World is not necessarily a fluke for me. Sure it was this amazing gateway into a very complex game… but the core mechanics are ultimately the thing that is keeping me there. I’ve had similar experiences with Generations, but I feel like 4U does a much better job of easing you into the game and giving you some semblance of a story to care about. At some point I fully expect to return to Generations and push a little further given that I have yet to actually get to a single real monster there.