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Videogames 2023: Dreams of the Sandbox Kings


IlyaP
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Finally finished Batman: Arkham Knight, although it turns out you have to collect all the Riddler trophies to get the full ending, which irritates the hell out of me. I may just watch the ending on YouTube instead.

The game had so many frustrating elements gameplay wise but the story is so great. I really wish they'd make movies from the Arkham games.

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5 hours ago, Darryk said:

The game had so many frustrating elements gameplay wise but the story is so great. I really wish they'd make movies from the Arkham games.

They...  did! There is an animated Suicide Squad movie taking place in the game universe!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Assault_on_Arkham

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7 hours ago, Ran said:

After much dithering, Linda and I got new computers. Last year was a very good one for us, so we decided to future-proof ourselves by... well, going pretty top of the line.

4K screens (although as main use case is video and graphics editing, we went with Dell Ultrasharps which have 60hz refresh rates and twice the contrast of other IPS screens), RTX 4090s (the MSI Suprim -- air cooled, not the liquid cooled version, and it takes awhile before the fans even spin up its heatsink is so beefy).

Inet (the best computer store in Sweden, IMO; they built our previous computers) convinced us to use AIOs for the 13700k CPU, and have to say we've been very happy with the performance so far in terms of keeping things quiet until the load is sustained for a few minutes, and even then I don’t think the fans crack 50%j. They also suggested 64 GB of RAM, after I figured 32 GB was enough, but they weren't wrong -- especially given the way games are going, I guess.

Done my first 4K, 60 FPS video edit and it was ridiculous how fast it was -- it feels no different from having edited 1080p on the old computers. And we've been playing with machine learning stuff, and lets just say that it goes a lot faster on a 4090 than it did using Google Colab and other such services.

As to gaming, I at this moment am too busy for it, but I did decide to try and see what I could manage with Cyberpunk 2077's benchmark. I can peg performance at 4k@60 fps with raytracing set to Psycho and almost everything at the highest setting (I used Digital Foundry's optimized setting guide to reduce a couple of things to medium/low where they said you can't really see any difference), provided I use DLSS Quality. Without DLSS, 30-35 FPS, which absolutely is playable but I'm not sure I can even see the difference in quality with DLSS on. Even Performance looks very good. And that's with the card undervolted and power limited to 80% (barely lose any FPS, reduce power usage, feels like a win-win). 

I am definitely ready for Phantom Liberty, whenever that comes along. I will probably leave CP2077 alone until that's released.

(Suffice it  to say, I have cancelled my GeForce Now subscription. )

Hum, been contemplating on buying a new desk top pc for a while. 

This one is old, proper old. If it were a fellow horse, it would've been on his way to the glue factory a long time ago.

CPU? Intel Dual Core E5800. RAM and onboard GPU are equally impressive. 

So wanna trade? :')

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1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Hum, been contemplating on buying a new desk top pc for a while. 

This one is old, proper old. If it were a fellow horse, it would've been on his way to the glue factory a long time ago.

CPU? Intel Dual Core E5800. RAM and onboard GPU are equally impressive. 

So wanna trade? :')

Damn, that is indeed old! I upgraded from the i5-2500k and a GTX 960, with a couple of SATA SSDs, to this new system. It's a pretty massive leap, so imagine the jump from yours?

I will say that the Intel Arc A770 cards are starting to look pretty worthwhile after all the improvements they've made to their drivers for older games, and they are definitely good bang-for-the-buck. Hardware Unboxed did a big review of GPUs using the new Harry Potter game that revealed you could play 60FPS with at 1440P with Medium settings, and that's not using Intel's XeSS (where I see one person was able to get 4K 60 FPS with raytraced reflections while using XeSS Ultra Performance). Plus it has AV1 encoding support if you want to stream or record gameplay.

 

 

Edited by Ran
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Not really aiming for high end stuff (days where I was an avid gamer (LAN parties, competing in the ESL etc.) are thing of the past), but this one is just so long overdue for the junk heap. I mean for the gamers, the last ES scroll game this machine could run was oblivion, the last AC game on it had Ezio/Desmond as protagonists. 

I mean it is so old, your mama jokes work on it.

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I'd caution against the Intel chipsets; while they are impressive at the price point the drivers and more importantly the support that OSes are providing them is not super awesomely stable at times. A recent example is this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/recent-windows-patches-break-directx-apps-on-intel-graphics

If you're comfortable having to update fairly quickly and/or watch out for things then it's probably okay, but otherwise it's probably the case you should stick with NVidia. 

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Speaking of Intel chipsets, it looks like Ryzen CPUs are performing really badly in that Hogwart's Legacy game -- equivalent Intel chips are performing as much as  45% better. The game is obviously badly optimized, as others have intuited from the various results.

That's the annoying thing for GPU manufacturers right now, the fact that developers botch things and they have to fix it. AT least Microsoft is coming up with a fix for the mess it made with Intel GPUs -- Nvidia actually had to come out with a driver update to fix an issue caused by Discord's devs where Discord was taking off 250 mhz of speed from the GPU. There's endless kludges in these drivers dealing with all sorts of weird bugs introduced by specific games and programs, because Nvidia or AMD would get the blame for them rather than the software devs.

Edited by Ran
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FIFA 22 is frustrating the hell out of me. Defending is a massive headache. Crossing doesn't seem to be effective at all. All I do now is play as PSG, keep giving Messi and Mbappe the ball and just run past their defence and shoot. Works 9 times out of 10 (although the keeper saves it 9 times out of 10 too, obviously).

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I just had to buy a new laptop, and decided (maybe against better judgment) to go for one that can play modern games. I've never gone AMD before, but it was what was available for the best price, and the reviews were good. I'm very excited to finally get to try Elden Ring and Cyberpunk, and it's great that I'll have a machine that should be able to handle Starfield and Dragon Age 4 when they come out. Though god only knows where I'll find the time for all these monstrously long games, especially with Tears of the Kingdom coming around the corner.

But for now... GBA games! I never had a GBA (or any Nintendo handheld since the Gameboy Color). While the game selection is pretty small, it's enough for now to be able to play Zelda: Minish Cap for the first time, and I'm going to try the Mario/Luigi RPG too. And then in the long term, I'm dying to play Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, not to mention GBA Pokemon games and all the other games I'm sure I missed out on.

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Hum, GBA emulator (VBA) runs on pretty much everything.

Personally, when I play pokemon games on PC, I tend to go overboard, and do engage in Breeding, which takes a bit, if you want a Garchomp with the right nature, and somewhat decent values on Speed and Attack (+egg moves) in platinum (or Salamance in post game). 

The sorta thing that kinda kill the fun of playing. On the other hand, this way I had zero problems with the endgame. 

Spoiler

my Garchomp simply outran Cynthia's and that was that.

Ah, sorry, Platinum is ofc a NDS game, but for those there's an emulator.

Edited by A Horse Named Stranger
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Started Metroid Prime Remastered. My love of Metroid is wrestling with my being terrible at 1st person games. The smoothness of the implementation combined with the fact that it's not really about the combat and has a lock-on aid is helping, though. 

 

 

10 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

and I'm going to try the Mario/Luigi RPG too.

 

It fucking rocks.


If you like JRPGs, give Golden Sun a go too when it hits. It's very cheesy, but it's one of my most replayed games of all time, charming as anything. If you're not familiar though, I should warn you that the sequel is a genuine sequel, not just a game in the same world/series or even just continuing a new story with the same characters. It's one game in two parts where you carry over your save data (by way of a very long password, though there was also a link cable option and you'd hope they'd finangle a way to transfer the data automatically for both this, when it hits, and the Zelda Oracle games). 


I hope they do bring some of the less obvious GBA games that I don't have at some point. Also: Final Fantasy Tactics. I have the second, but not the 1st. And I remember that one being better.

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4 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Started Metroid Prime Remastered. My love of Metroid is wrestling with my being terrible at 1st person games. The smoothness of the implementation combined with the fact that it's not really about the combat and has a lock-on aid is helping, though. 

 

 

 

It fucking rocks.


If you like JRPGs, give Golden Sun a go too when it hits. It's very cheesy, but it's one of my most replayed games of all time, charming as anything. If you're not familiar though, I should warn you that the sequel is a genuine sequel, not just a game in the same world/series or even just continuing a new story with the same characters. It's one game in two parts where you carry over your save data (by way of a very long password, though there was also a link cable option and you'd hope they'd finangle a way to transfer the data automatically for both this, when it hits, and the Zelda Oracle games). 


I hope they do bring some of the less obvious GBA games that I don't have at some point. Also: Final Fantasy Tactics. I have the second, but not the 1st. And I remember that one being better.

For Metroid Prime controls: if you're willing and haven't yet, I'd give the motion controls a try. At least on the Wii version they were so good and intuitive, and also made the game a lot easier compared to the Gamecube version. I'm sure dual stick is also a good control scheme for the Switch remaster, but I personally have always sucked at dual stick.

Thanks for the RPG recommendations - I'm definitely willing to try Golden Sun, and am even more excited to play Mario and Luigi now. As for FF Tactics: I'd love to play this, but based on the other subscription services, Square-Enix isn't letting Nintendo put their games on.

@A Horse Named Stranger You're right of course that it's easy to emulate GBA games, and I downloaded an emulator once before. But for whatever reason, I find it very hard to motivate myself to play old 2D games (or modern indie games, for that matter) on PC. Whereas somehow for me on the Switch, especially handheld, those kinds of games feel great to play.

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A friend got Hogwarts Legacy and it pissed her off before she could even start playing.

Apparently it doesn’t let you name your character with anything that it considers a “restricted word” So some people aren’t able to use their real names.

For some reason this includes Chavez. 
 

No idea why they would have such a feature for a single player game in the first place, much less a broken feature. 

Edited by A True Kaniggit
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12 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

For some reason this includes Chavez. 

 

I had a quick read-around, and it looks like they've gone so insane with the restrictions that the word 'chav' is on the list. 

So are things like 'poo', 'hell', and, rather brilliantly, 'dumb', meaning that 'dumbledore' is a name disallowed by the games' rules. 

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4 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:


A friend got Hogwarts Legacy and it pissed her off before she could even start playing.

Apparently it doesn’t let you name your character with anything that it considers a “restricted word” So some people aren’t able to use their real names.

For some reason this includes Chavez. 
 

No idea why they would have such a feature for a single player game in the first place, much less a broken feature. 

"Chav" is UK slang for poor, badly-educated people from council estates, stereotyped as wearing hoodies and tracksuits. Exactly why they've banned it from the game I'm not sure, though, given it's a relatively obscure world on a global stage.

4 hours ago, polishgenius said:

So are things like 'poo', 'hell', and, rather brilliantly, 'dumb', meaning that 'dumbledore' is a name disallowed by the games' rules. 

Meanwhile, in Final Fantasy VII a quarter of a century ago, nothing at all stopped you from renaming Cloud as "Dickman Fuckballz" (if you so wished) and this had no impact on the game, aside from a very rapidly-wearing-thin gag.

2 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I want Sensible Soccer back.

QFT. They did do a reboot a few years ago but, as could easily be guessed, it wasn't that great.

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On 2/12/2023 at 4:08 PM, polishgenius said:

I hope they do bring some of the less obvious GBA games that I don't have at some point. Also: Final Fantasy Tactics. I have the second, but not the 1st. And I remember that one being better.

There's only one GBA Final Fantasy Tactics game. The Sequel was a DS game and in my opinion far superior to the first one. Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is a GBA game and better than both of them. It is frustrating to play outside of an emulator with a fast forward button though, as the text speed is really slow. 

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