It’s Friday morning and I don’t have screeds or missives or ponderings to offer, so enjoy this crap instead.

Switch 2

We have three consoles in the house: a PS4, an Xbox One, and a Switch. The PS4 is in a box in a closet, the Xbox occasionally serves as a Blu-Ray player, and the Switch only comes out when my wife wants to subject company to the entire suite of Jackbox games. However, there is a rhythm game called Stage Tour launching in December that my wife desperately wants and the problem is that our current compliment of consoles are air-quote too old air-quote to play it, so we now own a Switch 2.

Why Switch 2 and not PS5-Fuck-You-And-Your-Desire-For-Media-Ownership or Xbox Who-Cares?-Microsoft-Lays-Everyone-Off Edition? It’s kind of convoluted. First, my wife learned that her sister and her husband played It Takes Two, so now my wife wants to have similar “quality time”. So we’ll be doing that at some point. Second, Stage Tour. Third, I’ve been heavily hinting that I want to get a second-hand GameCube so I can play LoZ: Wind Waker again, which is my favorite LoZ game. Since she was aware that Wind Waker could be played on the Switch 2 — and only the Switch 2 — that was strike three, so now we own a Switch 2.

I admit that despite the Switch languishing on the TV console for years, I’m still in the honeymoon phase with the Switch 2. I spent this morning looking through the eShop and favorited several games that I hope will go on sale this Holiday Season(tm), and at some point I’ll revisit my current Switch library to see what I might want to try playing again. Whether the new addition to the console library here at Chez Scopique sees long-term use is something I’ll have to report back on in a few months.

Underkeep

I’ve got this thing about old-school dungeon crawler games. Like a lot of things, something at the back of my brain says that I really like them, so I have tried several such as Legends of Amberland and Cyclopean, and have a few on my wishlist, such as The Secret of Weepstone.

One of the wish list titles, Underkeep, released yesterday (11/5) and it’s been a hoot so far. Amberland was great, but it was more like the original Bard’s Tale than Dungeon Master. Cyclopean was pretty brutal, and I’m too old for brutal. Underkeep has been tense, but not terribly difficult so far. My expectations are that at some point, I’ll die because I ran out of potions or food to rest, and my last save game will be immediately before that point, leaving me stuck in some cul-de-sac I can’t finagle my way out of.

Spelunkr.tv

Despite everyone’s pathological self-loathing for using social media, it occasionally burps up some bangers, such as when I saw someone on Instagram talking about Spelunkr.tv. If you’re a Person of a Certain Age like yours truly, you’ll have memories of the age when entertainment and information wasn’t available at every turn. We once had to be at the TV if we wanted to watch a show. Networks once made their own “movies of the week” that were, admittedly, hit or miss. There’s even a healthy modern trade in “vintage” TV commercials for anyone with a bit of nostalgia running through their veins to revisit.

Spleunkr.tv is a community effort to create “themed” channels around classic shows and all of the videos are played from the Internet Archive. When I learned about this site I watched about two hours of “Computer Chronicles” re-runs. While it was cool to revisit these slices of history as they existed in the early 90’s, especially the excitement that the hosts had about computers and the dawning of “The World Wide Web”, I got really and truly sad. They talked about everything with such hope in their voices for how these technologies would help us in the future; now, in that future, we know the reality missed those marks significantly.

Fun fact! Marion Stokes, an activist and librarian, is single-handedly responsible for over 35 years of videotaped TV, over 71,000 tapes. She was apparently concerned that, without concrete, dedicated plans in place all of the broadcasts made over those 35 years would eventually be lost forever. After her death, her collection was donated to the Internet Archive (the largest single donation they have ever received) who are still in the process of digitizing her collection.

Star Citizen

While everyone is out there enjoying their WoW Forever, I’m patiently waiting for 4.10.3 “The One About IAE 2026” to drop. Why? Primarily because it’s going to shake up my personal fleet with the acquisition of the RSI Galaxy, but also because it’s become a seasonal bellwether in my life over the past millennia or so since Star Citizen started development.

On a more ephemeral bent, 4.10.3 is merely a gateway we must pass through to get to 4.11 — excuse me, Star Citizen 5.0. Yesterday, news dropped that CIG had re-branded 4.11 to 5.0, specifically because it’s going to launch part of the Genesis tech. This release is going to be such a significant platform milestone that upping the major revision to 5 made sense; Pyro, the second star system, arrived in 4.0, so I expect this will be the way of things going forward.

Right now, though, 5.0 is on the EPTU (Evocati test server) so the participant pool is limited. While I’d love to get into the PTU and spawn on or near Nyx I — the new planet sporting the new generative and content tech — the last few times I’ve jumped the line in such a fashion I got annoyed with myself because I had to “start over” once the content reached the live, public servers. Genesis is such a significant QoL update to the game that I really, really want it to get here…and to get here in a working state.

That it’s testing now means that CIG would like it to launch before we close out 2026, but lately they’ve not been shy about holding back the patches if they feel they aren’t ready. Considering 5.0 doesn’t come with any major marketing pushes, and because CIG does take time off at the end of the year, I don’t know that I’d be sad if 5.0 launched in January if it needs to, but otherwise, I really hope it launches in December.