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I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

This is one of those things that I kind of always suspected would happen, but hoped it wouldn’t:

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles

As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.

I guess I always sort of hoped that physical media would carry on to some degree, even as its importance in the games business declined and aspects of it such as instruction books and posters and other pack-ins have vanished over time.

Come to think of it, physical games are actually kind of a drag now. You get the plastic case, you get the game media, but there’s nothing else. No poster, no instruction book, no registration card, no promo for game magazines. It’s compliance-level stuff; physical for the sake of physical. Ask anyone who is a nerd about vinyl records what it means to open the gatefold and see all the art and pictures of the band in full size. That stuff is still there. If anything, it’s more prominent than ever, because anyone buying records in current year is literally doing it for the love of the format.

My physical media hoarding habit was never about having the biggest collection or the best collection or something that I could monetize on Youtube. At first, it was about permanently solving problems of supply, where copies of a game were hard to come by and expensive on the secondhand market. I always wanted to have the game on the shelf because of the fear that one day I’d want to play that game again but not want to pay whatever the market was asking for it. But then that was solved, either through re-releases or through me having more money.

My focus then turned to games that had personal significance to me or otherwise represented an era in my past. I wanted to be able to pick up anything off the shelf, and go back to what my life was like and what the world was like on the day that game came out.

It’s the only reason any sane person would ever have a boxed copy of The Three Stooges for NES, even though there are obviously other, better totems someone could use to reminisce about 1989 with.

The story of that game was that you were the Stooges, and you had one month to raise as much money as possible to save an orphanage from an evil banker. It’s wild how rich assholes are assholes in any era. 1939, 1989, current day.

Anyways, the game itself was a collection of minigames that you played where the Stooges would take on odd jobs to earn money. It’d be stuff out of the show, like trying to win a boxing match, or eating crackers, or collecting medical supplies at a hospital. The ending you got depended on how much money you earned, with the endings ranging from “Ma barely keeps the orphanage” to “the orphanage gets renovated and the Stooges get married”. I only got the best ending one time. There was nothing particularly satisfying about that event, but it was nice to see what the orphanage looked like fully restored.

There’s a point to wasting half of this post on a nothing-burger of a Nintendo game though, and the point is this: you never think about games like that, or your personal experience with them, if you zip past them in a digital catalog. It’s only when you see the box on the shelf, pick it up and look at it, maybe pull it out of its acrylic protector, and flip through the manual.

Or at least, I don’t.

So I’d hoped I would grow old and retire and die surrounded by hundreds of these stupid little plastic tchotchkes I could use to retrace my steps from the 1980s to my death. Living on different coasts, in different countries, with different friends in and out of my life. All that stuff, chronologically laid out from its 8-bit beginnings in the Reagan era to whatever form this weird cross between art and technology happens to take 30 years down the line, in whatever post-democratic hellscape we all live in.

Instead, this lineage will sort of die at the halfway-mark, with the back half of my life being represented by entries in a digital catalog that nobody, least of all me, will ever see, touch, or hold. And that’s kind of sad.

Maybe I should take up record collecting. Any chance that’ll still be cool in 2050?

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Pixelly Remastered

I’ve spent the last few weeks digesting the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters. Square-Enix announced the set of six awhile back without pinning exact release dates on the games, and in spite of the rash of immediate negative comments about certain aspects of the trailer (which seemed to amount to the same “it doesn’t look like the original” comments that have plagued other rereleases over the years), I figured now was as good a time as any to play all six in order.

Only problem is I thought the games would be drip-fed throughout the year so I could fit them all in between other activities like Final Fantasy 14 or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Unfortunately for me, Square-Enix saw fit to drop half of the games all at once, and if I didn’t deal with them more or less immediately, they were destined to fall off the radar. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened either; at one point back in 2019 I had the PSP releases of Final Fantasy 1-3 and a jailbroken PS Vita all lined up and ready to go, and I chased a butterfly for a week and the whole project went on the shelf. So, everything that could go on hold went on hold this time, I installed the games on the new PC I just built a month ago, and got to work.

Enhancements and add-ons found in other releases of the games, like the conversion of spell slots to MP in the PSP release of FF1 or additional dungeons/content found in the Dawn of Souls package on GBA were rolled back in favor of more or less presenting the original games with a new coat of paint and bug fixes. I thought the detail about the spell slots in FF1 was going to irritate me more than it actually did. Ethers are a thing in item shops now, and using one restores one spellcast at all levels. As you can imagine, this does attenuate the game’s difficulty quite a bit, because once you start rolling in money later in the game, it’s nothing to just stack up on ethers and go full blast with your black mage if you want.

The one detail of note in this first drop of games is the fact that Final Fantasy 3 was delivered in its original 2D format this time. This finally closes the loop on the ‘lost’ entry in the series for those of us in the West. We had been blessed with the 3D remakes beginning in 2006, but those came with some challenges. The story goes that the game could only support showing one-third as many enemies on screen as in the original, so the development team saw fit to respond to give enemies triple their HP and in some instances give enemies multiple turns per round. Even in encounters like boss fights, where there was ever only one enemy in the first place! That change was mercifully not kept in the remaster.

That’s not to say all of the boss fights are necessarily cakewalks, either. In all three games, I frequently found them to essentially be a race to see whether I got to the bottom of the boss’s HP before the boss got to the bottom of my resources. In Final Fantasy 3, that came with the added factor of my job selection sometimes having an impact. The game is pretty good about giving hints that you need a particular job in particular situations, like needing dragoons for the fight against Garuda or a scholar against Hein, and if you ignore the hints, you’re going to have problems.

Aside from smoothing out the difficulty, the soundtracks have also gotten a lot of attention for their own re-imaginings which were supervised by the original composer. It might be best just to paste a few examples and hope the Youtube videos don’t get taken down, because the before-and-after comparisons are quite stark.

FF3 – Doga and Unei (original)
FF3 – Doga and Unei (remastered)
FF2 – Pandaemonium (original)
FF2 – Pandaemonium (remastered)

I’m not intentionally ignoring Final Fantasy 2 in this review; Final Fantasy 2 has by far the strongest narrative of the three. It’s just marred by its character progression system that builds stats and effectiveness with spells/weapons based on what actions you take and how often you take them. It’s easy to game if you want, although I’m still confused about how weapon skills are supposed to progress. The max level of any spell or weapon is 16. Maxing out a spell is easy – just keep casting it. Higher levels require more casts (and more MP), but you’ll eventually get there. I got there with Cure just by having one character as a dedicated healer throughout the game. For weapon skills, none of my characters got past level 9. Supposedly the enemy level impacts weaponskill gains, meaning you can’t boost to max level by farming goblins outside the starting town, but even against the toughest enemies in the last dungeon, I rarely saw progress bars move.

All told, all three games are worth everyone’s time and attention. The ‘remaster’ aspect of the games is really pretty great, in spite of folks’ complaints about the font or lack of availability on consoles. But if you’re constrained by time or finances and can only afford to delve into one of them, Final Fantasy 3 would be the recommendation. Seeing this game finally presented in 2D format is nice all on its own, but it also features the greatest depth of gameplay of the bunch, and you can be in and out in under 20 hours.

So far it sounds like Final Fantasy 4 is on deck next in a few days, with the remaining two games still TBD. I just hope that 5 and 6 show up well enough in advance of Endwalker coming out that they can be played through before Endwalker comes out. It’s going to be tough balancing either or both of those games against an MMO expansion that’s essentially going to eat up multiple months to get through.

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New PC build, finally

I missed updating last weekend due to reasons. Nothing really to update anyway.

This weekend however is a different matter, because after six years, I finally have a new PC.

The last time I built, I had settled on an ITX board and case because I was starting to fall out of love with the idea of having a mammoth PC capable of handling anything and everything. My build in 2011 (which I sadly do not seem to have the pictures for anymore) was in a large case, included multiple video cards in SLI, multiple hard drives, and a DVD burner. It was a nice build, but the case was also extremely heavy and the PC as a whole was capable of things that frankly I did not need it to be capable for. I don’t think I ever even burned any DVDs, for example.

So I went small in 2015 with the intent to focus on just the ability to play the occasional game. It served the purpose just fine, but building inside the Fractal Node 304 case was an absolute pain:

  • The case is deep rather than tall, with the mainboard and power supply essentially sitting right next to each other on the floor inside. The board’s SATA ports were facing out from the board right into the power supply, so I had to right-angle connectors and very carefully jam everything together in order to hook up the drives.
  • There was nowhere to cable manage anything, so I ended up with a rat’s nest of cables just hanging out in the area where you’re supposed to mount drives.
  • The board never quite managed booting off of an M.2 drive on a consistent basis; if I cold booted the machine I’d get a bluescreen, but soft resets afterwards would boot just fine.

Then in the intervening years since that build, what I needed out of a PC shifted again as I focused gaming more on consoles and computing more on Macs. That is to say, I didn’t need a PC at all except in the odd occasions where a Steam game was only available on Windows or I needed to do some development work.

So with all those in mind, after thinking about the Steam Deck for a few minutes and deciding I needed something a bit more general purpose, I settled on the following:

The Define Nano S case seemed to have an answer for everything I didn’t like about the Node 304. It’s still an ITX case, but it’s more of a traditional vertical design, so the mainboard and power supply are stacked vertically instead of sitting right next to each other. I’d say that solves the clearance issues I was having with SATA cables, but now the build doesn’t have SATA drives in it so that’s a moot point. But the case does have space for cable management around the back, so I can run things from the power supply behind the tray.

The higher core/thread count on the CPU vs. the Intel Core i5-6600 I used to have is greatly appreciated for the odd weekends when I need to do some development work or spin up some virtual machines for one reason or another. Turns out four cores/four threads just aren’t enough to go around. The Noctua cooler was easy enough to install, and even though the fan is a weird babyshit brown color, it’s going in a case with no windows so nobody can see it anyway.

And speaking of no windows, I’d just like to point out that PC components are getting awfully gaudy now. I built a PC back in 2002 that had a blue lamp on the inside of it, and the novelty of the thing wore off after a couple weeks. Now everything has RGB lighting on it; case fans, graphics cards, memory, mainboards, everything. Even the stock cooler that came with the CPU this time had RGB lighting. Maybe it’s just me getting old, but I really appreciate a solid black box that draws no attention to itself.

The graphics card is actually a holdover from the old build; GPU prices are still too high for me to stomach at the moment. My immediate plans for the PC involve the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and other games that run fine on older graphics cards, so the need there isn’t quite as dire.

Memory is actually a holdover as well; although I couldn’t solve CPU core count right away when I needed to do some dev work last summer, I could at least solve a lack of RAM by throwing as much as the old board would support at it. 32GB is already quite a lot even for what I was doing, so no plans to throw a 64GB kit in anytime soon.

The two M.2 drives are configured in RAID 0 so they present as a single 500GB drive to the OS. This seems somewhat finicky from what I’ve seen so far. If you don’t load the AMD raid drivers when you install Windows, the OS will instead see the drives individually and treat them as two separate drives. Then when you duck back into the BIOS later, instead of having your one RAID 0 array, you now have three RAID arrays – the one you intended to have, and two more that you didn’t intend to have. But once you sort out how to get everything working, it works. I’m still amused that we can have hard drives that are the size of a stick of gum and that we can mount directly onto the mainboard without needing to run cabling to them. That’s very helpful in keeping the build as clean as possible.

To combat the rat’s nest part of the equation, I opted for a fully modular power supply in this build. Now the only cabling in the case is what’s actually required… except for the second PCI-E lead on the cable used to plug in the GPU. That’s been neatly tucked away though.

At any rate, with the board out on the table and all components plugged in, we have a successful POST, as indicated by the solid white light in the bottom corner:

Doing everything out in the open first is better than mounting all the parts in the case and then discovering there’s a faulty component, or worse, a faulty board.

And here’s everything installed and cable managed into the new case.

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Nierly perfect

A look at the most-attempted failed logins on the site is a pretty good indicator of the need to basically never use default usernames in your application:

Failed logins

Two of the top three were “admin”-type usernames which aren’t even configured in this WordPress install. Funny how that works. Anyways, Wordfence is nice. If someone got my actual username and password, which would be a trip because even I don’t know what the password is (because it’s a randomly generated value saved in password manager) they’d still get stuck on the two-factor authentication and not be able to sign in anyway. Exciting.

Last night I finished Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139…, which is the actual title of the game. Overall found it to be quite good. The story revolves around a post-apocalyptic world where humans are struggling to get by in the face of dwindling resources and an existential threat from monsters roaming the roads and fields in-between settlements. It’s tough to explain too much more of the plot without giving away the whole thing. The Wikipedia article has a fairly complete rundown of things, though.

The one thing that’s been interesting about the Nier games, both this and Nier: Automata, is the multitude of endings the player can unlock. In Automata, there were twenty-six in total (one for each letter of the alphabet), and many of them are peripheral to the main story. Things like yanking 2B’s OS chip, as helpfully demonstrated here:

Don’t try this at home

It’s a fun ending, complete with blitzing through the credits and admonishing the player not to tamper with an android’s operating system. And, it was actually the detail that prompted me to buy the game originally. I remember seeing an article about it and thinking “oh, I have to see what other fuckery is in this game now”. There was indeed plenty of fuckery to be had, but you don’t need to have it all to get through the main story.

In Replicant, things are much more streamlined – there are only five endings, and all of them are essential to progressing the story:

  • A: Initial completion of the main story; you’ve seen all the major plot points involved.
  • B: Starts from the mid-point of the game; as you play through, you see more cutscenes/dialogue than you did before.
  • C: Same as B, you replay the second half of the game again. There are more cutscenes/dialogue than before, but now the game ends with a choice for you to make, and this ending is the outcome of one of the options presented.
  • D: Branches off from B the same was as C did, but you don’t need to replay the second half of the game – you just reload from the last save before the choice mentioned above and take the other option instead. This ending deletes your save data!
  • E: Start a brand new game after viewing D and having your data wiped; play the first few hours of the game and then the story suddenly branches off into an epilogue that provides the ‘best’ ending in addition to restoring the save data that was previously deleted.

So in total, that’s a complete play-through, two trips through the second half of the game, a reload/rerun of the last dungeon, followed by a few hours back at the beginning again, just to see the whole story. This is what happens when your director is a bit of an arteest.

Yoko Taro

Personally, as enjoyable as the game’s story is, I’d have much preferred to experience it in a single run rather than having to replay significant portions of the game multiple times just to have the gaps filled in. Automata makes this mistake too, as you get stuck in entire arcs of the overall story where the twin-stick shooter minigame becomes a significant component of gameplay. It was my opinion at the time that the minigame isn’t interesting enough to carry the weight of the world on its shoulders (ha, expert-level reference) and I still hold the same view now.

At least the whole thing isn’t too obnoxious. You’re essentially New Game+’ing your way through things, which does speed up the whole operation.

I also wasn’t a fan of how completely inane most of the side quests were. We’re talking dozens of rote, go-here-and-collect-things fetch quests. There are plenty of conversations between the party members that break the fourth wall on this one though; complaining about being the town’s errand boy, wishing there was a way to warp back to the client after doing the thing they ask you to do, that sort of thing. Takes the edge off a bit.

There’s also the connection of this game’s story to the story of Automata, which takes place in the same universe. The Big Reveal late in Replicant is extremely similar to the Big Reveal late in Automata; so much so that no matter which one you play first, the impact of the Big Reveal in other game is going to be dulled significantly. Not that it was bad… just that it gives the feeling of “oh, we’re doing this again”.

The game gets full marks for its soundtrack, though:

Song of the Ancients FOR AN HOUR

So yes, would recommend.

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