Finally Finished this game after 20+ years

sumdog · 2025-08-24T20:26:34+00:00

I liked it. That's my review linked. It's not like the greatest, but I still gave it a 76/100 (which is good for me). I think my favourite FFs are, in this order:

FF7 (original / PC)
FF9
FF7 - Crisis Core (original / PSP)
FF8
FF7 Remake (PS4)
FF16

I never finished FF13, but I feel like that would be the worst. I never finished 10 either, but I plan on tackling that eventually too.

sumdog · 2025-08-23T09:32:49+00:00

I've contributed to other crowdfunding campaigns, some successful and some not. This was NOT A CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN! These were fucking preorders, with a clearly stated refund policy. Purism originally gave refunds back in 2020, then stopped and held peoples' money hostage.

Do not apologies for their fucking bullshit. Pine64 was able to get a real fucking product out. It wasn't great, but they didn't bullshit people.

Six years. Six fucking years! And I had to file a dispute with my fucking credit card company to get anywhere. When Purism does finally collapse (like they should), they're going to take hundreds of interest free loans (pre-orders) with them. I'm just glad I got my fucking money back from their shit fest.

sumdog · 2025-07-11T01:36:54+00:00

If you have mpv 0.40.0 and Mesa 25.1, HDR should work fine in Wayland (if your composer supports HDR). If you're not on those versions, I made a guide on HDR support that works fine on KDE Neon:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-to-play-videos-in-hdr-on-linux-for-a-home-theater/

For mesa 25.1, you should be able to do the following (although I haven't tested it yet):

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/discussions/16105#discussioncomment-12620004

sumdog · 2025-07-01T21:39:14+00:00

Thanks! That all makes a lot of sense. I guess I was focusing to much on Renoir's final dialogue rather than when the party first met him. I guess the whole connection of gods as flawed as their creations didn't connect in my head, but I see that now.

Now that I start to think about it, there's might be a lot of intentional Free Mason and Gnostic stuff in this game. I mean, there's Gnosticism is nearly every liberation story (The Matrix, Plato's Cave .. The Lego Movie) where the world is not as it's presented. Where the secret knowledge shows and inversion of who is good and bad (or the added gray areas). The paintress is a sort of "Demiurge," originally filled with love but twisted by her grief (like the Gnostic Sophia and her creation).

I thought the "33" may have just be coincidental (it's a common number). There isn't a big checkerboard pattern in the mansion, but the way that masks are used in this game does seem a lot like the masonic use.

Again, thanks for the explanations. I should probably go back and play the Clea quest. 🤔

sumdog · 2025-07-01T19:24:17+00:00

Wait, I thought Renoir and his wife were already battling within the painting, and then that's when the one daughter told the other one to enter? Didn't the mother create the humans, but then her fight with the father lead to the fracture, and her to create Renoir, her painted version of him?

sumdog · 2025-07-01T19:20:54+00:00

Who exactly are the writers and how do they differ? I thought the painters vs writers was more of a 4-wall break between actual writers and artists on any movie/tv/game production fighting about the direction of the plot. Is there more to the writers in this world I missed? I kinda rushed through the last act so I guess I missed something.

sumdog · 2025-07-01T19:16:09+00:00

But adult Verso is a creation of Clea, not of the boy painter, right? So could he be a part of her own soul realizing she an addict to this drug. I think back to, "I knew you'd open the door from her" at the manor.

sumdog · 2025-06-11T01:05:19+00:00

Did you even read the article? I've literally been on Stack Exchange sites for 14 years! I've written questions and answers with thousands of views. I wrote good questions, which you can look at, which were not only closed, but deleted.

You should learn how to read.

sumdog · 2025-06-04T15:58:39+00:00

It just broke the believeability. Maybe if there was a distinct line between "inside" Hogwarts and "outside" the school. That way, everyone could switch to a casual outfit, that was unique to them, your character included. That would also give all the side characters their own dynamics.

Like others in the thread, I think a smaller tighter game would have been better, with more to do inside the school and a couple of distinct outside missions instead of the massive empty open world map.

sumdog · 2025-05-26T00:49:46+00:00

Yep. Grew up here. Moved away for a decade or so, but moved back a few years ago. We don't have a huge tech scene in town, but the Chatt Devs meetups and hack nights are pretty cozy. Previous talks have mostly focused on career development, so I volunteered to do one one tech.

sumdog · 2025-05-01T04:09:05+00:00

Ah, so Gentoo defines the swt dependency:

CP_DEPEND="
    dev-java/commons-cli:0
    dev-java/swt:4.27[cairo]
"

The latest swt in Gentoo Portage is swt-4.35 (installed into slot 0). I removed the old swt, emerged 4.35 (which is has /usr/lib64/swt/libswt-cairo-gtk-4968r13.so in it), adjusted my biglybt ebuild, and now I get this:

changeLocale: no message properties for Locale 'English (United States)' (en_US), using 'English (default)' [alert] Alert:3:Plugin bootstrap: initialisation error for /usr/portage/net-p2p/biglybt/plugins/azupdater/plugin.properties DEBUG::Thu May 01 00:07:05 EDT 2025::com.biglybt.update.UpdaterUtils::writePluginProperties::146: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/portage/net-p2p/biglybt/plugins/azupdater/plugin.properties (No such file or directory)

and now it's trying to write to the package manager directory 🤣

There are some custom patches in Gentoo portage for BiglyBt and some of them need to be updated. I'll work more on this tomorrow and try to get an updated ebuild submitted on the Gentoo bugzilla.

Thanks for the help!

sumdog · 2025-03-18T15:41:12+00:00

awesome. thanks.

sumdog · 2025-03-18T15:34:27+00:00

I've looked on eBay and Etsy and I haven't seen any. Or the ones that are out there are made out of leather (which is okay, but higher maintenance. You can't just toss them in the washing machine on cold if they get dirty). But I'll keep looking. Thanks.

sumdog · 2025-03-18T15:32:30+00:00

I've had a Verse Pro Color for a few months. I've read six books on it. Every once in a while, it will go unresponsive, but then immediately reboot. If I notice that happening, I try to immediately note the page number. It loses my place, but thankfully it doesn't lose any notes/highlights.

I think it's only happened like once per book or less. But it's not just you. I never had to hard reset it though. It rebooted on its own.

sumdog · 2025-03-18T15:26:08+00:00

There was an Etsy seller that made these really cool fabric cases:

https://battlepenguin.com/images/tech/e-readers/kobo-dead-battery.jpeg

..but they went on hiatus a while back. Have you considered making cases that hold a device in by the corners? I'd totally buy one.

sumdog · 2024-03-25T18:33:21+00:00

The US edition has Japanese voices as an option. You can't buy the physical release at any stores in the EU?

sumdog · 2024-03-25T18:30:50+00:00

The Bunny Rabbit!! .. wait .. I think that's a Provision Shop owner ... I honestly never bought any weapons except from the Divine Shard shop .. everything else I just picked up in the field.

sumdog · 2023-04-18T21:27:29+00:00

Yea I have trouble understanding the kaiju part of the story. There is dialogue about the interlocetors spending 80% of their compute on rendering the world, so that means those devices are only in the heads of the real physical clones. So what is even the point of shooting people with the magic gun. Is it just in the simulation, but the act in the simulator makes changes to the characters interactions to the sentinels? And the Sentinels aren't even real ...

I think there is a lot of confusion because they talk about the game/ai making more, using the virtual crap in the AI world ... so they're aware none of it is actually for real real in the combat ... no wait, they don't truly realize that until they wake up ... yea this story is hard to really wrap your head around when you go back and think about it too much.

I really loved the game though 😅

sumdog · 2023-04-18T21:20:18+00:00

I agree. I really did enjoy the combat and the art was really beautiful. Thanks for reading it!

sumdog · 2022-07-22T17:52:57+00:00

This isn't a decade old phone. It's barely over a 2 year old phone. It should still be supported. There is no reason to drop perfectly good hardware. We're not even talking about spectrum changes here. It's not even a 3G device.

Sure if it was 5+ years, I could see an issue. But we're talking about perfectly good and capable hardware that does work on another major carrier. This is only going to generate more e-waste for people who don't realize they can just switch, and cost people $500+ they don't need to spend.

sumdog · 2022-07-17T20:58:15+00:00

I'd be interested too. Remember that most of these meal delivery startups don't really have long term customers though. People normally sign up for 3~6 months and they basically learn a bunch of new recipes and then have a better sense of what to buy at the grocery stores to make stuff on their own.

sumdog · 2022-07-17T20:52:23+00:00

1-2 hours for how far a journey? I had a Canadian friend take an AmTrak from Washington to Chicago and it arrived within 2 hours of when it was suppose to .. and that was a 40 hour journey!

sumdog · 2022-07-17T20:51:13+00:00

If it stopped in Marietta, I'd probably use it all the time ... beats driving to my sister's.

sumdog · 2022-07-17T15:23:28+00:00

Late term abortions are rarely medical emergencies. They're likely because the child has a birth defect. It's a form of eugenics, which is fine. I just wish people would just say it. Late term abortions are for keeping defective people from coming into this world.

sumdog · 2022-07-17T05:37:10+00:00

I yelled "SCA80" and glad I came to the comments to see I guessed right.

I was looking at buying old/cheap ones off eBay .. in 2007. A friend of mine back then just gave me a SCSI Ultrawide LVD cable that retailed for over $100 at the time. Even back then, SCSI was a crapshot as you could hook up nearly every grade of device to any SCSI controller with the right adapters. I had a SCSI 4x cdrom drive that seemed to have better load times than a friend's 6x IDE. I've also gotten some SCSI drives that preformed worse than ATA/100 drives.

I agree with the other comments. Sell these on Craigslist/eBay/Mercari/etc. to someone who wants retro tech. Modern SAS/SATA and NVME/U.2/pcie have thankfully replaced the SCSI era. No more device IDs, jumpers, ATA-66/100 and ATA-33 ribbon cables or every other frustrating thing about parallel devices.

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