Been a bit distracted from my usual pursuits by the acquisition of a Nintendo Switch (2nd-gen model with increased battery life, not the Lite). Right now I’m mostly alternating between Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Cat Quest, with occasional excursions into a few other purchased and downloaded games.

My token JRPG is Tales of Vesperia, which was on sale on the Nintendo store; typical slooooooow start, sadly has save points so you can’t just save and exit to go do something else. Katamari Damacy REROLL was also on sale, which should be an amusing time-killer, and make use of the motion controls. Actual cartridge-based games besides BotW are Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, and Senran Kagura Peach Ball (busty ninja catgirl pinball-service).

I’ve played through all the Cat Quest content before, but it’s been a while, and the sequel comes out in a few weeks, so it was worth trying again on a new platform. I’m already up to the last battle in the main quest, and since it doesn’t look like they have achievements on the Switch, I should have all the interesting stuff wrapped up in time for the new one.

Having skipped all previous generations of Nintendo gaming (I used the DS Lite primarily as a Japanese study tool, and the Wii held my attention for about a week), I had no prior exposure to the Zelda franchise, so Breath Of The Wild has been an entirely new experience, marred by their decision to make all the weapons out of balsa and tinfoil. Combining a tiny inventory with weapons that shatter after maybe two encounters is jarring, and apparently new to the series. You can eventually expand your melee/bow/shield inventories to a reasonable size, and eventually find weapons that break slightly less often, but for the first N hours, it’s just annoying.

Seriously:

1. woo-hoo, found a bow/sword that does more damage.

2. no, wait, it broke in the middle of a fight and I have to use a crappy one again.

3. …which just broke, leaving me scrambling to pick up whatever the last mob I killed dropped.

4. that broke too? Time to run away while looking over my shoulder and dropping bombs. Which are free and unlimited and do good damage and are also better for mining, tree-cutting, apple-picking, crate-smashing, etc.

Adding insult to injury, some non-weapons take up slots in your melee inventory, forcing you to abandon really good weapons that you know you’ll need 15 minutes from now when the current ones break, just so you can light a fire, steer a boat, or apply kinetic energy to deserving boulders.

Probably will buy

• Rabi-Ribi; cheesecake bunny-girl side-scrolling platformer. “Retro” resolution for gameplay, full-res for cutscenes and dialogue. (technically I already bought this one, but can’t play it until Thursday)

• Cat Quest 2; really enjoyed the first one. (ditto, but can’t play until next Thursday)

• Munchkin Quacked Quest; 1-4 player roguelike set in the well-known SJG franchise. Release date unknown.

Might buy

• Gun Gun Pixies; tiny alien girls invade a women’s dorm to “study” them. And shoot them. For their own good.

Won’t buy

• Skyrim; I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into this one on the PC, and doing it all again without mods doesn’t sound like any kind of fun.

• Diablo III; loved the first one, thought the second was kind of meh, never touched the third one due to the cash-grab bullshit. Sounds like they’ve cleaned up their act a bit over the years and made it more game, less real-money auction house, but never matched the core gameplay that made the original so awesome (even with quirks like deleting your save file when DST started or when you changed your hostname).

• Witcher 3; own it for PC based on claims of an open world, never really got far enough into it to get off the rails.

• Civilization VI; III was best, IV was decent, I’m not sure I even own V, and VI was boring on the PC.

• Pillars Of Eternity II; never finished the first one.

• anything in the Mario franchise; they just don’t grab me.

• any sports, Disney, racing, “exercise”, media-tie-in, Pokemon, dance, etc.

• Jumanji; special will-not-buy for this movie tie-in game, because they made Ruby Roundhouse ugly in the trailer.

According to the reviews, it’s cheap-as-in-shoddy, but I thought it was amusing to see a hand-cranked braiding machine designed to make 8 or 12-strand Kongō-gumi, marketed to tween girls for friendship bracelets. Based on how dusty the kits are that I see in stores, there’s not a big market for (literally) cranking them out by the dozen.

What saké should be paired with Miku-flavored Pringles?

Right after the 2016 election, the owner of Penzey’s went Full Batshit in his newsletter, going so far as to say he didn’t want the business of anyone who didn’t demand that Trump be removed from office. So I stopped being his customer and switched to a company that sells spices rather than hate, The Spice House.

Three years later, the deranged dipshit’s still at it, buying ads demanding impeachment.

As the Bee put it:

Survey Finds More People Would Support Impeachment If They Knew What Crime Trump Was Supposed To Have Committed

Gosh, what’s the downside to constantly popping up “do you really want to do this?” boxes?

Tyler Hall explains:

This is so trivial and stupid that I’d usually call it a nano-aggression or pico-aggression, but given the subject is combining characters in typography, I’m going to have to label it a pica-aggression.

Worst part is the replies take this bullshit seriously.

I can’t wait to see the Unicode folks cave to this nonsense and create a combinatorial explosion of directly-mapped emoji including all possible jendyr/raes/idenchy, to be immediately followed by complaints that the hex code for transbrown questioning dragonkin herm is proof of bigotry because it’s numerically higher than cishetyelloman.

And by that I mean Serious Sirius and Formidable from Azur Lane, equipped with rather remarkable flotation devices. Like most warships, they often find themselves exposed, even with allies to wash, er, watch their backs.

Formidable’s standard outfit made it a bit challenging to find pics that didn’t need to go behind the NSFW tag, even after relaxing my usual rules a bit. Not that Sirius was easy.

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I missed Yuuna And The Haunted Hot Springs when it aired. An assortment of screenshots and short video clips convinced me to give it a shot, and I found it a perfectly delightful harem comedy. Sadly, there’s no US Bluray release, and Crunchyroll has the steam-and-lightbar-censored broadcast version, and they don’t have the 3 uncensored OVA episodes, so off to the torrents we go!

(NSFW after the jump)

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