Video Games: Mystery Box Character Creation

[Inkdaub]

Thanks for the breakdown, Ran.  My pc now is a couple years old so maybe when it comes time I'll try to build one myself.  Also I just looked up thermal paste and one of the hits said you can also use toothpaste but thermal paste is better.  So that's good news. 

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

The worst recent one was The Outer Worlds. Until they eventually patched it, that text was completely unreadable for me.

I had the exact same issue, and it was bad even after the patch. This has only been improved because we’ve recently got a much bigger TV, but it’s still not great.

[Werthead]

This Star Wars: Squadrons hands-on is very encouraging. They actually got someone who's played the X-Wing series to do the hands-on and he reported that it replicates the feel of the original 1990s games very well. Certainly way closer to that than the Rogue Squadron arcade stuff. He did note the game is a bit more forgiving at allowing you to bounce off things rather than instantly explode, but given how brutal the originals could be, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

11 hours ago, RumHam said:

Wow do people know who Ian Curtis is in the UK? People barely know New Order in America. Though our suicide rates are super bad so there's that. 

Well, Ian Curtis and Joy Division are British, so yes? They're probably much better-known now than they've ever been, and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is one of the most famous songs in British musical history ("Blue Monday" is also up there, but not as omnipresent).

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Cooling for CPU (fan or water-cooling; some CPUs will come with stock factory fans, others will not; you may also need thermal paste for the CPU, but some cooling solutions have it prepared with paste and others do not; do not use thermal pads, they mostly suck)

I have heard horror stories about installing CPUs manually (also it's ridiculously easy to bend the pins), so that's the one thing I'd never do. You can get motherboard-CPU combos with the CPU pre-installed and the whole thing guaranteed, so I'd always roll with that by preference.

[Fez]

6 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

Thanks for the breakdown, Ran.  My pc now is a couple years old so maybe when it comes time I'll try to build one myself.  Also I just looked up thermal paste and one of the hits said you can also use toothpaste but thermal paste is better.  So that's good news. 

As someone who only got into the hardware side of PC gaming in the past few years (I still haven't built a PC from scratch, I paid someone to do that; though I have replaced nearly all the parts myself), I think there are three big concern areas that can really trip you up. Everything else is relatively straightforward so long as you're careful and willing to follow along to youtube tutorials and such. 

1) Installing a CPU. It is absurdly easy to bend one of the hundreds/thousands of tiny metal pins that stick of it, and if you do, good luck getting it straightened out exactly how it needs to be. 

2) Applying thermal paste. It's hard making sure you hit the Goldilocks zone of having just the right amount of paste spread evenly.

3) Anything to do with the BIOS. You can generally avoid these problems by making sure that you get a CPU that matches the version of the BIOS that your motherboard has. Otherwise, you'll have to update it. I had to flash a new BIOS on my old motherboard once and I found the whole experience to be extremely nervewracking and I was very concerned I was going to brick it. Maybe that's just me though, the actual process wasn't too hard. Actually installing an OS isn't too bad, and once you've got Win10 running, everything else is easy.

[Ramsay B.]

I’m a little further into Ghost of Tsushima and it continues to be amazing. I highly recommend. Beautiful game.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

This Star Wars: Squadrons hands-on is very encouraging. They actually got someone who's played the X-Wing series to do the hands-on and he reported that it replicates the feel of the original 1990s games very well. Certainly way closer to that than the Rogue Squadron arcade stuff. He did note the game is a bit more forgiving at allowing you to bounce off things rather than instantly explode, but given how brutal the originals could be, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I read another hand's on somewhere where the reviewer felt the game had a very high difficulty curve, but they had no real familiarity with flight sims, so I'm pleased with that.

I doubt it'll happen, but if they include a campaign or scenario editor, fans could extend the single-player experience to an amazing degree.

 

[Inkdaub]

15 hours ago, Fez said:

I still haven't built a PC from scratch, I paid someone to do that

I suppose it's common sense but I didn't even consider this an option.  I might want to do this because I'm afraid to build it myself.

[Corvinus85]

I built my PC years ago, and overtime added a couple of upgrades. I can't say I did a stellar job, but it works. I have been thinking of doing another built, but in these uncertain times, I will not spend money on this just yet.

[Jace, Extat]

1 hour ago, Inkdaub said:

I suppose it's common sense but I didn't even consider this an option.  I might want to do this because I'm afraid to build it myself.

Find a computer friend, take them out to dinner in return for putting it together. Anyone who says no to that isn't your friend, it's thirty minutes of work tops.

[Poobah]

1 hour ago, Inkdaub said:

I suppose it's common sense but I didn't even consider this an option.  I might want to do this because I'm afraid to build it myself.

As others have said the only really scary/risky bit is putting the CPU on the motherboard. Everything else is just fitting things in to the holes they fit in plus a few screws here and there. Personally I didn't have any issues with installing my CPU either but I'm... I have pretty steady hands and I'm very detail oriented so I was sure I had it correctly oriented and placed and I can certainly understand why people would hesitate to do that since it's one of the most expensive parts. As someone, I think Werthead? mentioned you can buy motherboards with preinstalled CPUs to get around this, if you don't want to pay or don't know someone who can do it for you.

[Ran]

Honestly, the main reason people bend pins is if alignment is off and they go, "Hmm, just need to push more." If alignment is right, no force is necessary, it'll plop right in.  Here's how easy it can be with a Ryzen CPU:

 

 

[Kalbear]

Yeah, the CPU pin thing is definitely something that has gotten absurdly better. RAM slotting too. But it always gives me anxiety to do it because I did kill a cpu one time. 

[Mexal]

I finished TLOU 2 last night... visually a gorgeous game and it's fun to play but man, like most everyone here, I had some serious storytelling issues. Oh well.

[Werthead]

Returned to my Fallout 4 replay and spent some time focusing on the settlement side of things. I don't have the patience to build really crazy things like you see people doing online, but I did link all my settlements together, recruited a ton of new people in each settlement and started sending out caravans. If you do this enough and arm the caravans with crazy-good armour and weapons you find but don't need yourself, you can pretty much pacify the entire Wasteland, which is fun (although it does raise the question of why no-one else has done this in the preceding 200 years, but there you go).

I did build a concrete monstrosity just inside the entrance to Sanctuary, fairly bristling with missile launchers, autocannons and lasers, and defended by all 15 of the game's companion characters, several wearing Power Armour. Since I hit Level 50 the AI realised it could start sending out raiding parties that were a lot tougher, but even they fall before the glory of Fort Kickass. Admittedly mainly because they tend to be Supermutants with a Suicider leading the charge across the narrow chokepoint bridge, and inevitably the suicider gets hit and goes up first, which tends to take most of the party with them.

Incidentally, I hope Bethesda come up with better physics for their next few games. Seeing a rickety, half-collapsed, 200+ year old wooden footbridge being completely unscathed by multiple mutli-kiloton nuclear blasts is getting ridiculous.

[Poobah]

I needed something to get my dumb brain to shut the fuck up for a bit this week so I returned to one of my favourite games - Celeste. It's odd: it requires (at least from me) a lot of focus to do well and it can be very frustrating at times if I'm in the wrong mood, but I also find it incredibly relaxing to get in to that flow state where all that's going through my head is the game's fantastic soundtrack and the moves I need to execute to succeed and I get a lot of satisfaction from the eventual feeling of mastery that comes from all the practice, incremental improvement, and eventual success.

This week's on and off practice snagged me the last couple of golden strawberries I was missing from the C-sides and the dashless berry from 1A, taking my berry total to 190, which is for now feeling close to as many as I'll have for a while, but one thing that's always happened with Celeste is that every time I feel like I've reached the limits of my skill, that the next level or goal is too unobtainable, I find out that I was wrong, that if I practice a bit more it is in reach.

[Mark Antony]

On 7/25/2020 at 2:50 PM, Ramsay B. said:

I’m a little further into Ghost of Tsushima and it continues to be amazing. I highly recommend. Beautiful game.

I love it. Haven’t played much at all but every time I’m wandering around in the world I’m like this is fucking cool . Vibes are great on this game 

[Inkdaub]

22 hours ago, Ran said:

Honestly, the main reason people bend pins is if alignment is off and they go, "Hmm, just need to push more." If alignment is right, no force is necessary, it'll plop right in.  Here's how easy it can be with a Ryzen CPU:

 

 

This guy doesn't even seem to be handling it all that gently.  Though he has likely done it a thousand times.

 

On 7/26/2020 at 6:02 AM, Poobah said:

As someone, I think Werthead? mentioned you can buy motherboards with preinstalled CPUs

This is another thing to check into. 

 

On 7/26/2020 at 5:50 AM, Jace, Basilissa said:

it's thirty minutes of work tops.

Now I feel like I can do it myself after Jace saying this and watching some videos.

Well I have some time to figure it out.  I finally got Windows to update again after weeks of refusing. 

[Fez]

I did end up playing a fair amount of SWTOR. It's a bit of shame that its an MMO (and not a particularly great one, though it is passable), but that is some vintage, quality Bioware writing. So that's been fun, even though I don't particularly care about the Star Wars lore.

Not sure how long I'll stick with it though, there's a bunch of indie PC games coming this week that I want to check out.

I also played another hour of FFXV and, yeah, I don't think that's the game for me.

[Mexal]

10 hours ago, Mark Antony said:

I love it. Haven’t played much at all but every time I’m wandering around in the world I’m like this is fucking cool . Vibes are great on this game 

I really like it too though I can feel it getting repetitive. I haven't played enough of the main storyline yet to push that forward, just keep some of the secondary stories from the original main quest line (Ishikawa, Masako) plus clearing logging camps or rescuing people in the road. Gorgeous game, fun combat for most part and interesting setting, just hope it's not all the same. Witcher was repetitive at times, but there was a variation in bad guys or storylines that at least helped keep it different.

[Rhom]

27 minutes ago, Mexal said:

I really like it too though I can feel it getting repetitive. I haven't played enough of the main storyline yet to push that forward, just keep some of the secondary stories from the original main quest line (Ishikawa, Masako) plus clearing logging camps or rescuing people in the road. Gorgeous game, fun combat for most part and interesting setting, just hope it's not all the same. Witcher was repetitive at times, but there was a variation in bad guys or storylines that at least helped keep it different.

I'm intrigued and want to play... but it is also supposed to have a PS5 version at launch, is it not?  I may wait for that.