God of War Ragnarök: A Perfect Sequel

Bias upfront, I’m fully in the bag for this franchise! (My review of the previous installment, here.)

With the latest installment of God of War, Santa Monica Studios confidently doubled down on what made the last installment such of a success. This game knows exactly what it is, an epic an immersive adventure campaign. It breaks with trend from other game studios to try to emulate large-arena online multiplayer or throw too many modes into a game with too little QA. (cough, Halo Infinite, cough)

The game picks up 3 years after the events of the last installment. Fimbulwinter is in full effect, ostensibly set in motion by the death of Baldur. A realm-hopping adventure ensues with surprising twists and turns; including both familiar faces and well-imagined new characters. It is a father-son adventure. It is a coming of age story. It is an epic throw-down of cosmic proportions. Its just damned fun. Honestly, this game has a better story than most recent Marvel movies. The story is well done, the voice actors are well cast and the gameplay never felt like a grind. Most importantly - they stick the landing.

My son and I played through the campaign over a few days, with him occasionally taking the controls from me in frustration of my old-guy reflexes and persistent stubborn refusal to turn-down the game difficulty. The game doesn’t include an official co-op but it isn’t really a detriment, in my opinion. Having a game where you can hang on the couch and pass the controller back and fourth is such a refreshing change from the high-fps-multiplayer focus of most modern console fighters and battle sims.

Pro-Tip: When the friendly NPCs suggest you take some time to explore, take that hint and use the opportunities to buff the character by completing favors or exploring the realms. These prompts are well-placed throughout the storyline.

Collector’s Edition

I put a not-insignificant amount of time into trying to find the Jötnar Edition but I refuse to buy from scalpers. Eventually, I found a Collector’s Edition (which is a slight step down from the Jötnar Edition) at Best Buy.

Funny, the God of War Ragnarök Collector’s Edition Box is larger than the PS5 box.

I do appreciate that the interior box riffs on the Jötnar shrine motif from the game. That’s a nice touch. The included Mjölnir toy/prop is larger, heavier and nicer than I expected though I suspect it wouldn’t survive a great amount of rambunctious playtime.

I did find it a little strange and disappointing that even the Collector’s Edition failed to come with an actual disc but instead a steel case with placeholders for two discs and download codes.

W.T.F.

Performance Observations

We played on both the PS4 and PS5. While the PS5 edition looks great, the PS4 edition looks great, too and performs surprisingly well. The game-load times aren’t punishing on the older console. I suspect they targeted the lowest common denominator for performance benchmarks and allowed the PS5 GPU to do some basic environmental effects and lighting enhancements through #if-[env] type directives or target-conditional compilation.

In this, I think they found the right balance; especially considering PS5 rollout and inventory challenges. All this to say it looks great but I don’t think it ever actually challenges the PS5 hardware. Our PS4 is on a 4k QLED Samsung and the PS5 is on a 4k OLED. The inky-deep blacks of the OLED/PS5 combo really made some of the scenes pop but if you are rocking an older setup - you will still find some jaw-dropping visual set-pieces.

Video Clips

The video clips below might serve as mild spoilers. You have been warned.

Scope and Scale

It took several multi-hour game-sessions to complete the main storyline while taking time to complete 2-3 side quests per opportunity in order to buff the characters. Figure about 30 hours to complete the main storyline. At conclusion, I found that I’d only completed about 35% of Vanaheim, less than half of Svartalheim and Alfeim. Like the last game you are encouraged to continue playing through a number of side quests and explorations that are also quite fun. My only complaint is that at times you can feel that you are after-the-story because your NPC traveling companions have little to say or are repetitive. The challenge of filling 60+ hours of relevant and entertaining dialog isn’t lost on me.

PS5

I scored a (retail) PS5 last month. Pretty wild when you think about it that the PS5 was released in the end of 2020 and in the 1st third of 2022 they are still hard(ish) to come by; outside of scalpers.

My in, was the Best Buy Total Tech membership. I had signed up for it in order to get access to a GPU for a virtual pinball and gaming PC build. Aside from other benefits around warranty and rewards points, the Total Tech Membership gives you early access to hard-to-find things as they come into stock. The membership is $199/year (kinda steep IMO) but since I was able to buy an RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 at retail, it already paid for itself in my view.

At any rate, I’m not a huge modern console gamer but there are some touchstone titles that I feel compelled to play. On Sony’s Platform, for me: God of War & God of War Ragnarök are must-haves. The original game left such an impression, I was excited to revisit it with upscaled graphics in preparation for the new game this fall.

Astro’s Playroom

The PS5 is bundled with Astro’s Playroom. This game is great, especially considering the tenuous footing from which it was created. The point of the game is to acclimate you with the controller on the PS5 and the game itself is little more than a playable commercial for Sony PS merch. In it, you play as this little robot, Astro and explore hardware-themed levels and unlock Playstation memorabilia. That’s it. Doesn’t sound fun, but it really is.

The primary thing that makes Astro’s Playroom great is level design coupled with adorable characters. I know, that makes me sound like a pre-teen girl referring to a favorite stuffed animal but Im a 40-something beer-and-whiskey drinking nerd guy, unashamed to tell you the characters are cute. If you stop playing for awhile, it pulls out a little PS Vita or PSVR and entertains itself. At times, you can see the character shaking its little robot ass to the theme music of the stage you are on. All hail our future ass-shaking robot overlords.

Most gamers are probably aware of the history of Mega Man and its influence on level design that reaches even into modern games. Kitamura paid special attention to level difficulty, the idea being to allow the difficulty of the game to ramp up at a natural pace while maintaining a consistent-average-play-time per level. He wanted the game to teach the players how to play gradually, wanted to reduce the chance of players being stuck and frustrated and emphasized re-playability.

Astro’s Playhouse is a bit of a love letter to these early tenants of game design. The level design finds a balance of feeling open-enough to not be claustrophobic while balancing difficulty, skills and power ups to keep it engaging. Cute characters, good theme music and sound effects and quick respawns round out the experience to make Astro’s Playhouse a very fun game. (Despite being a giant Playstation Commercial.)

As a bonus, the PS5 is powerful enough to play Astro’s Playhouse while other games are installing. Pretty bad-ass.

Unreal Engine 5 City Sample

Unreal Engine 5 released a playable demo alongside the streaming and blu-Ray release of Matrix Resurrections. The UE5 City Sample includes cameos from Reeves and Moss and offer two modes: a playable car chase reminiscent of The Matrix Reloaded and a free-world environment to explore the City.

City Sample is available for free on the PS Store (search for Matrix Awakens) and the City Sample is available for download for free within the Unreal Marketplace. It includes assets, textures, models and examples to highlight UE5’s capabilities for film makers, creators and game devs.

RetroStone 2 Follow-Up (Video)

A month later, I took at look at how RetroStone 2 is progressing. It has come a long way!

RetroStone 2

yeah, my living room table is a little bit of a catch-all. keepin’ it real, ya’ll.

On a cold night one of my favorite things to do is to sit by the fire with a handheld game system. This simple wish was my hope for the RetroStone 2. I’ll briefly walk you through how that’s worked out, so far.

What’s a RetroStone?

There have been a myriad of portable retro gaming offerings over the last few years in a variety of form-factors. Everything from jailbroken PSP’s or PSP-clones to custom-built raspberry pi handhelds and everything in between.

Looking ahead for the holiday gifts, I ran across the Retrostone through a few articles & reviews. In the process I found that they were planning a hardware refresh, the Retrostone 2.

Pi-based retro gaming systems have been popular projects over the last few years. Even Amazon has Raspberry Pi-based kits that can be built into NES, SNES and other clone cases. For a small fee, including SD cards pre-loaded with games and ready to go. Over the holidays I bought my son this handheld retro multi-game from Amazon.

The Retrostone is essentially this, built into a Gameboy-esque case. The average Gameboy multi console on Amazon costs between $45-$100, the one I mentioned above was $60. This Retrostone 2 costs around $225 by comparison. I ordered the Pro version in order to get the 8gb NAND and gambling those load outs would ship first.

Hardware

The Retrostone 2 runs an ARM Cortex-A7 A20 processor running at 1.0GHz.

Why they opted for the custom board vs the $35 Raspberry Pi 4, I’m not sure. Assuming it has something to do with power draw.

At first impression, I’m seeing performance issues galore but this 1Ghz dual-core should be more than enough for most classic games.

For now I'm going to just have to trust the smart-guys’ judgement on this.

Complication Station

This is the part that’s annoying. Because of the legal and licensing minefield associated with such things, the RetroStone comes without any software installed. You have to handle that part and as far as I can tell there isn’t an abundance of folks willing to stick their necks out with pre-configured microSD cards. Like most MAME and console emulator builds these things are a kludge of loosely related bits of mostly volunteer maintained open source software. I’ll try to remove some of the “who does what”, below.

Retrostone runs RetroOrangePi, which is a bundle of various open-source tools optimized for the Allwinner CPU.
RetroOrangePi includes a variation of Armbian, a Debian ubuntu linux distribution for ARM CPUs.

It also includes RetroPie, which itself includes RetroArch and Emulation Station. These lines are less clear but you can think of it is a multi layer bean dip with Armbian on the bottom with RetrOrangePi modifications, talking to RetroArch in the middle which is standardizing I/O between multiple emulator hosts and Emulation Station on the top providing a slick launcher front end to launch your games.

Initial Impressions

The Pro versions did ship a few days earlier than the rest, so that gamble paid off a little.

Packaging was good. Lots of padded envelope goodness.

Holding it and pressing the buttons, it had good tactile feel. The case is a bit on the chunky side but I don’t see that as a knock, it feels well built and has good weight. The screen-size, which is report-ably the big upgrade over v1, seems really nice.

From there, my initial impressions are frustrated a bit by the software side of things. On the day my RetroStone arrived, I found dead links at the Retrostone 2 tutorials pages, dead links for some of the RetroOrangePi variants OS and little or no documentation.

In this way the Retrostone 2 reminds me alot of the ArpiCade. Relying on the goodwill of people on an enthusiast forum to get your $200 toy to work. In fairness the Retrostone site and related kickstarter pages are very clear that it doesn’t include software.

I would imagine that is because: lawyers and because: support. I get that, really. But it doesn’t change the frustration level for me as a person that “does computer troubleshooting and programming things” for a living when my hobby has me doing similar computer troubleshooting and programming things to a degree that isn’t expected.

Reading on forums of others who aren’t necessarily as technical and unable to figure it out, I saw an apologist throw out this line:

Why would you expect anything different? Cars don’t come with gas from the manufacturer and guns don’t come with bullets loaded".”

Which, to me, is an asinine comparison considering every car sold by a dealer has a full tank of gasoline and a sticker telling you exactly what kind of gasoline to use. The bullet analogy is misguided too. More accurate would be if you bought a gun and have to make your own shells from existing reload supplies. But,I digress…

First Impression: Oh crap, is It Completely Broken?

My third downloaded image from the RetroOragePI site was labeled “Retrostone 2 Beta” and was under a “Full” heading, implying the build that would include the full linux support. Initial bootup showed a “No Gamepads Detected” welcome screen.

Welcome, indeed.

Clicked all buttons and d-pad, did nothing. I sat it down to grab a whiskey and when I came back, the D-Pad inputs actually worked.
This happens on every boot. A 30-45 second “lock up” and error message complaining about the gamepad.

Looking at the RetroOrangePi forums it seems like this might have been a bug as a result of the late addition of wifi as part of the kickstarter stretch goal. Initially, when I got the error above, I went on to try other (and earlier) Retrostone builds. My thoughts were:

Hey, the kickstarter as all of these screenshots of this thing working, maybe I can get some joy from an older build and just adopt the recent build when its ready for primetime. “

Evidently the existing tutorials and docs for Retrostone 1 don’t apply to Retrostone 2 and I suspect they may not even apply to Retrostone 1 anymore because the software stack has changed considerably.

The most noticeable example of this is in the instructions on how to add games.

Problem is in this version of the software the Start-button popout menu does not include the launch desktop feature.
After some digging, I found the Desktop feature. It is under RetroPie-(System) then RetroOrangePI.

After plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse combo, you have a full X server linux desktop to interact with. From here, you can file copy roms from a thumbdrive to the running machine image so that they will show up in the menus.

UPDATE: After getting to this point, I found this sticky forum post dated 1-7-2020 that covers the location of the Desktop and steps to get wifi connected.

its go time…..?

After successfully solving the escape room UI puzzle to get the linux desktop going and get some ROMS loaded, my brain dropped a little dopamine to give me a spike of excitement that maybe we were ready to rock with this thing!

The result?

Unfortunately that first build wasn’t ready for primetime, at all. At that point in my adventure, every game on the system that I tried across multiple systems (NES, SNES, Megadrive) including those sample games included with the image are too laggy to actually be playable rendering the Retrostone 2 as a paperweight or nerd wall-hanger.

Another trip to the forums and I found a new build was ready, this weekend…

The latest version of the software does have the linux desktop shortcut on the start menu, though when I tried from that menu it locked up. The retroOrangePi shortcut continued to work, though. The dev had a few suggestions following the build that weekend, one was to disable gpio and the other was to change the default SNES emulator to snes9x2002. I believe both of those suggestions are formalized in the latest build.

Lag Fixed? Success!

The latest build was much better. NES, SNES & Megadrive games all seemed to be playable. Sometimes there is a lag but nothing quite as disruptive as before. The latest build starts to normalize the emulation station config, as well. Putting the Desktop feature on the start menu (though that part actually hung when I tried) and tweaking towards a generally cleaner theme.

Summary

My suspicion is that this is one of those projects where the “the hardware team” and “the software team” behind the scenes aren’t fully gel’d up. I suspect, though that those are teams of 1 (person) doing it part-time, for fun on the side. (But that’s just a guess.)

Over on the software side, I’m monitoring the forum and trying to send good vibes to the volunteer work going on to solve some of these problems. I’m trying to be useful but not in the way. I’m not really mad at them, seems like they got the final hardware on the same day I did. Alexkidd released a few builds this weekend, alone & I expect there will be future updates while it has his attention.

I’m not really mad at the hardware side either.

Over on the kickstarter comments of the hardware side, people are giving Pierre hell about shipping delays and every other imaginable thing. Sometimes kickstarter is like Twitter but worse because everyone paid to be there. I’ve found Pierre to be very responsive over on the 8BCraft site. That said, I didn’t really pick the Retrostone looking for a kit. Had I wanted a kit experience I would have thrown the best possible hardware at it and minimized the software stack to my purposes. It definitely isn’t a polished system right now but I think it has alot of power & potential to be an ultimate handheld solution.

I did get finally get to spend some down time on a cold night with a dog snuggled in on one side, the cat snuggled in on the other, a black coffee on the table and some retro gaming goodness in my hand..

Concluding Thoughts

I’m good w/ my purchase but at this time I don’t think I can actually recommend the Retrostone 2 given the current state of affairs. This is based solely on value & performance. Retroarch gets chunkier with each release as new, advanced features get piled on. (Things like streaming, recording, network stack support, bluetooth controllers and more.) This creates a platform baseline overhead in CPU and RAM consumption. The Retrostone 2 screen is really quite good but I suspect the choice to step backwards in CPU capability is going to haunt this device’s upgrade potential over time.

of course.. I could be wrong. I’d like to be proven wrong.

I plan to revisit the project in a month to see how it has developed and I’ll update my opinions if I see a performance optimization miracle. In the meantime, I urge patience for those customers of the Retrostone 2 and I also suggest Retrostone 2 customers consider making a donation to the RetroOrangePi developer for their efforts on this project. If you do, reference Retrostone in your donation and it’ll inevitably get the technical love it needs to go from good to great.

Mo’ Retro!

I’ve been a little quiet here for a few weeks with a busy schedule of life-related things. However.. you might have noticed a new menu item on the site. I shut down the “merch” link for now, since it cost me nearly $50/mo to run and added something a little different.. I’ve been exploring some “other retro” things that are nerd-adjacent, although not entirely related to arcades and pinballs.

BBS

First of them, is the BBS. I spent some time trying to revive my old OBLiViON/2 BBS, “The Graveyard” (of course it was the graveyard, because.. I was 14) but I haven’t had a ton of luck finding it on my archives and backups.

So, I’ve been going down a route of building up a “new” BBS using a modern Node.Js BBS Platform called Enigma. Time will tell if this was a good decision or not but I’m pretty familiar with Node and this gives me the ability to host the BBS on a super-inexpensive instance on AWS. Note: I tried to use an Azure Windows instance for this but Azure doesn’t support 32 bit or earlier OS’s without a bunch of flaming hoops.

Over Labor Day weekend I was able to get some inter-BBS door games running via BBS Link

My current challenge is trying to get a few local-doors set up so we can have control over game-resets and don’t have to join a game so far along in progress. I’m making progress on that front…. Hopefully this week I can get my licensed BRE running on the instance…

Getting DOS running on Linux is like herding cats.

More details on this to come…

Multi-Cartridges w/ Everdrive

In other news… I’ve been playing with some multi-carts from Krikzz, as well. More details to follow… but my initial impression is: “I’m having a great time with it.”

This has been part of a larger “project” where I’ve hooked up the NES, N64, Gamecube, Genesis & DreamCast to a 19” Television for a retro-gaming trip down memory lane. Sadly, my Atari 2600 needs some repair but I’ll get there..

Mortal Kombat 11 (Now w/ PTSD!)

Mortal Kombat 11 boasts a strong fighting engine with excellent potential for more technical fighting, diverse combos and amplified attacks. Unfortunately, I found the enhanced gore of the animations to be a heavy distraction from gameplay rather than a motivation to keep me engaged in learning finishing moves.

Tagline, 1993. I’m 14. Living in a new town, 600 miles from everything I’ve ever known. Our house is a strange mix of cable-spools and lawn chairs for living room furniture and the smell of new waterbeds wafting down the hall.. I do have a computer and I eventually have a dedicated modem line to run my OBV/2 BBS, The Graveyard. At night, Razor1911 couriers are dialing into the PC to drop 0-Day Warez and I hear mom and dad in the other room arguing -talking about “maybe going to jail” because of [wah-wah - insurance, something-something - wah-wah] that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

We lived in a hotel the previous summer - The Ramada Inn on the Causeway in Mobile, Alabama that has since been demolished - near R&R Seafood. I suppose we were technically homeless but getting a new start. Growing up on 10 acres on the edge of an Indiana Forestry I found myself for the first time with the suburban freedoms enjoyed by kids in my favorite Spielberg movies.

Me, my bicycle and a BP gas station a few blocks away with a Mortal Kombat acade machine & Taco Bell Express. My teenage mind was blown with the opportunity. I fed so many quarters into that machine and played against football-playing high schoolers that were twice my size and a tendency to menace me when they lost. Admittedly, sometimes I let the Wookie win.

Sometimes, I didn’t.

This person named Hillary Clinton was on the television talking about censoring my favorite albums (2 Live Crew, RATM, Tool, Gravity Kills, God Lives Underwater) and the dangers posed by this new menace to America’s youth: Video Game violence.

- ”Is all the world Jails and Churches?”
(well, that was VietNow (1997) but you get the point)

Agreed that is a long walk to get you into my headspace. Now that you are here, pull up a lawn chair and let’s set at the cable-spool turned-coffee table and have a chat about video game violence, 26 years later.

I remember being annoyed when Mortal Kombat (1 and 2) were finally ported to home consoles with minimal gore, no-blood and paired down graphics. It just wasn’t the same game, anymore. Mortal Kombat 1 was the first arcade game I ever bought. I own and often still play a MK4 w/ MK1, MK2, MK3, Mk4 PCBs in it. I let my 13 and 9 year old kids play it and think nothing about it.

Enter, Mortal Kombat 11. MK11 (I’m playing on the Nintendo Switch) continues a trend in the MK franchise through the introduction of mid-fight super-move sequences that can be triggered during a match when a player’s health bar reaches a critical part. MK9 called these X-Ray moves because they used an X-Ray camera view to show the devastation being wrought to the opponents skeletal structure.

If you think of MK3, where there are improbable grapples where an opponent might crack the fighter’s neck or damage their spine during the match. It’s like that. The moves do an incredible amount of damage at the expense of player control for both players but do not necessarily completely drain the opponent. As unlikely has it might seem, Liu Kang can hop back up and keep fighting after Katana snaps his neck..

Mortal Kombat 11 calls these Fatal Blows and they are a strategic crutch that either player can employ to provide momentum for a comeback or level the health meters. The thing is: Fatal Blows in 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11 are the equivalent of 1993’s MK1 or MK2 Fatalities.

Which means.. the fatalities… are more so.
How much, more?

Maybe, PTSD levels of more.

In my best Obama, “Let… me.. be.. clear:” I’m not saying that playing through MK11 gave me any form of PTSD. But I will say that MK11’s fatalities in particular probed the edges of what I’m comfortable watching and classifying as entertainment. Several points during my initial play through of the game, I had a sensation that I can only describe as my neural-net-firewall throwing a warning. “Hey, there are things going into your eyeballs that you should be aware that we aren’t sure is good for us.”

Sure, previous Mortal Kombat games were equally horrible in the fatality death of a character through evisceration, explosion, decapitation and more. This installment in the franchise pauses at the worst bits of horror while the reward and menu system delay to return user control by to the player.

For instance: You get to see Kronica tear your character in half length-wise. Pause. Put you back together through a time-rewind and then tear your character in half at the waste. Repeat as many as 6 times until the menu renders allowing you to navigate the game.

Most fatalities now end in the complete drawn-and-quartered explosive destruction of the opponent and the game developer seems pretty proud of their bloody accomplishment as featured through the game credits.

Searching the web, I found that there is at least one case of an individual who worked on the game being treated for PTSD:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/one_mortal_kombat_11_developer_had_to_see_a_therapist_after_violent_dreams

Take that with a grain of salt, it was picked up as click-bait by half of the internet. No such thing as bad publicity, right?

I’ve met soldiers who operated turrets from inside armored vehicles in Afghanistan. Instead of gunning from an exposed position, “Playstation Johnny" sits in the relative armored comfort of his vehicle as he mows down the enemy from a computer monitor and gamepad. Despite this, Playstation Johnny has just as much potential for combat fatigue and mental trauma as the guy with boots on the ground carrying a rife.

In the mid-90’s I found myself frowning at the Pant-Suited Politician trying to censor my video games and music. 26 years later I find myself wondering if the ratings label on this game is an adequate communication device juxtaposed to the affect it might have on an emotionally developing mind.

I feel like I should love this game but I don’t. The hazards of adulting, I suppose? If my 14 year old self could see me now, he’d probably kick me in the nuts.

“Go get laid, kid.”

RetroAdvance, Update

Non-existent support but still a cool little device.

As previously mentioned, my Retro Advance arrived with a pretty big flaw. Not being able to maintain power with the battery compartment door on the game was a pretty limiting.

I reached out to support via email, Facebook and a webform. Unfortunately, no one responded.

I worked out a fix ( in my case) by removing the back (just a couple small screws) and re-seating the battery pins on the PCB. I also added a dab of hot glue on the back of the connector pad to give it additional rigidity and keep it from moving under the pressure of the battery springs.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, this $40 toy hit the nostalgia spot on design. Pretty cool “chill and play” size and a nice walk down memory lane. Even if it is a probably-not-properly licensed knock off from a what appears to be a fly by night company.

My general thoughts summarize as:

Pros:

• Very good screen brightness

• Pretty cool game list

• Decent button-feel

• Extra style points of the knock-off Gameboy design

Cons:

• Slow shipping

• Non existent support

• ‘Meh’ off angle screen viewability

• Dumb boot up menu language selector

• Questionable Durability

RetroAdvance, First Impressions

Received my Translucent Black RetroAdvance, today. Took about a month to come from over the big bond. (Insert Great Wall of China / Border Wall joke here)

It has the potential to be very cool. It feels alot like the classic system the case is inspired by and the buttons feel good.

Unfortunately.. it kinda.. doesn’t work. (Video below). I’ll give them a chance to respond, I’m sure they will make it right :)

I’m sure I could rework the connectors, shave away some plastic, shake magic electrical chicken bones at it, etc… I’ll wait to hear back before I put on my MacGyver Hat.