Been checking out Yooka-Laylee. Game was a kickstarter project, made by former Rare employees to recapture the majesty of games like Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 (these guys also put out other N64 masterpieces like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and Diddy Kong Racing). Game is fun-- I feel the mainstream publications have been way too harsh.

I'm a fan of Easy Allies (the successor to Game Trailers, who did the best video reviews)

After an utterly disastrous 2016, where I about worked myself to death, (Which culminated in handing a huge portion of what I earned from all that work to the government yesterday), I've resolved to take time away from my job, my political hobby (if you can even call it that), and my writing, and focus on beating the giant backlog of video games I have. I have a stack the size of a small mountain, most of it purchased at 1:00 or 2:00 AM when I was finished working, because "Hey, I'm just getting done with work and it's the middle of the fucking night. At least I can get this game that looks cool." I'd play it for 2-3 hours the next day and then promptly forget it when the next overtime day came along. So I've resolved that I will be working through this list of games for 2017, and I'm not picking up anything new until I've finished the current backlog.

At the top of the backlog is an obscure 3DS RPG called 7th Dragon III: Code VFD. It's a sci-fi RPG set in a near future world that's been overrun with dragons. You have to travel through time to Atlantis, Eden, and forgotten alien civilizations beneath the depths of the Earth, fighting hordes of dragons with a force of samurai, hackers, Yu-Gi-Oh style card duelists, and maids who are equipped with some kind of bomb-launching rocket spear. Amazing fun.

I just spent two hours fighting one particular boss, a dragon hunter who fused with something called a "True Dragon" to become a crimson angel of death with an enchanted katana and brutal status-based attacks (A single attack that both paralyzes and confuses when your equipment can only defend reliably against a single bad status, and a special attack that's instant death for any characters who are either paralyzed or confused.) After 10 or so tries, I finally managed to make it past her status attacks, and drive the bomb-launching-rocket-maid's super attack right through her heart.

I'll leave the boss fight music here since it's amazing:



This was, by all accounts, a completely useless way to spend an evening. But I feel much better than I would have if I spent it on yet another useless argument over whether the Jews are secretly mind-controlling the people of North Korea, or sending out another endless round of emails for business I don't really need. I'm definitely going to be spending more the rocket-maids and less time on the Politics and War subforum.

The next game in the Total War series.

(04-25-2017 11:49 PM)Transsimian Wrote:  



The next game in the Total War series.

I wonder what the tech trees will look like to get me a few Based Stickman units for my stack.

Anybody here own a Nintendo Switch? Is it worth getting?

No games for it yet, supposedly. A friend bought it to play Zelda and it sits on his entertainment unit gathering dust.

(04-26-2017 02:57 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  No games for it yet, supposedly. A friend bought it to play Zelda and it sits on his entertainment unit gathering dust.

It's too bad that there are nearly no games available for it besides Zelda BoTW. The concept looks really good though, especially for someone like me who is constantly on the go.

Been stuck on Breathe of the Wild. Truly an amazing game, Nintendo can get simplicity, story, and nostalgia together for an amazing game.

(04-26-2017 05:25 PM)Cr33pin Wrote:  

While the gameplay might be no better or worse than a contemporary shooter I'm not all that thrilled with the historical settings of BF1 and now the next CoD (although I guess CoD really needs to shake things up a little, even if it means going backwards, to remain relevant). I prefer modern day firearms in games.
I suspect Battlefront 2 will be my online shooter of choice at the end of the year. Not that laser rifles really count as modern day - they were after all used a long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

Oh, vey, They just revealed the trailer for the new CoD and polygon are already crying the game is too white, and only guys, not incloosive enough.

I like what I see in the trailer, no more inclusive shit like female soldiers is a huge plus.

Are those same developer teams that made all these future CoD games? Btw, it seems they are listening to fans wanting for CoD to get back to its roots.

(04-26-2017 07:04 PM)MikeS Wrote:  

(04-26-2017 05:25 PM)Cr33pin Wrote:  

While the gameplay might be no better or worse than a contemporary shooter I'm not all that thrilled with the historical settings of BF1 and now the next CoD (although I guess CoD really needs to shake things up a little, even if it means going backwards, to remain relevant). I prefer modern day firearms in games.
I suspect Battlefront 2 will be my online shooter of choice at the end of the year. Not that laser rifles really count as modern day - they were after all used a long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

Another MOHAA remake?

COD: WW2? I get a feeling that the online servers are going to be full of Nazi players engaging in, how should we put it, "less than politically correct dialogue."

There hasn't been a seriously big WW2 game release since the rise of the alt-right.

This, gentlemen, is going to be a fuckfest of epic proportions.

(04-27-2017 11:08 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  COD: WW2? I get a feeling that the online servers are going to be full of Nazi players engaging in, how should we put it, "less than politically correct dialogue."

There hasn't been a seriously big WW2 game release since the rise of the alt-right.

This, gentlemen, is going to be a fuckfest of epic proportions.

Take a look at Day of Infamy, great game from the same guys that developed Insurgency. I recommend it 100%, might be too tactical for some tho

If you've played Red Orchestra 2, the gameplay will be like that, now with helicopters. Not sure if the maps would be big enough to support jets, seeing how it's UE3 based.

(04-27-2017 11:08 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  COD: WW2? I get a feeling that the online servers are going to be full of Nazi players engaging in, how should we put it, "less than politically correct dialogue."

There hasn't been a seriously big WW2 game release since the rise of the alt-right.

This, gentlemen, is going to be a fuckfest of epic proportions.

Wow dude, thats a extremely rare Pepe you got there!

How many bolivars did it cost?

It cost many a bolivar, and I shall thank you not to reproduce it, peasants!

^^^

What if we gave you toilet paper instead of bolivars, senor? They're worth roughly the same.

Toilet paper? Bah. I wouldn't wipe my arse with toilet paper!

Anybody ever used a laptop with an eGPU for gaming? I'm thinking about building that instead of putting money into my desktop box right now. I'm curious if anyone has anything particularly bad to say about the method.

What I'm planning on using is an expresscard-based external GPU slot like this:

https://www.banggood.com/Expresscard-Ver...09976.html

I'll either buy a Dell DA-2 220W power supply for $10 online, since I know that works with the eGPU adapter, or use one of my handful of ATX power supplies I have sitting around.

For the GPU, right now I'm planning on buying an EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (specific version to be determined) but I'm open to buying something else. I don't much like the 128 bit memory bus width the 1050 Ti has even though it's supposedly a very solid card for the price.

Then I'll hack together some kind of enclosure for it. Maybe out of sheet steel and rivets since I have some lying around from a recent project. I want this to be quite portable and easy to set up, which is why I'll probably go with the Dell power supply. It's more like a laptop power supply than a big ass ATX brick with cables flopping all over the place.

I'm leaning toward the eGPU instead of just upgrading my desktop for a few reasons:

1. I can have this set up for < $200, whereas I'll need to put around $350 into the desktop to get the same amount of RAM my laptop already has and a CPU fast enough that it won't bottleneck the GPU. My laptop CPU is only a dual core with hyperthreading (i5-3380m) but I think it will be fine for 1600x900 resolution. That's the best monitor I have anyway.

I've heard TW3 utilizes hyperthreading well, so hopefully that's true.

The current CPU in the desktop is an ancient Phenom II. Totally worthless for modern gaming.

2. I'm interested in general purpose computing on GPUs, including potential applications in cluster computing, and this will serve as a hardware proof of concept for one of my ideas. I'm not made of money here, and I'm thinking about making a small cluster of refurbished T430 laptops since they're pretty fast, cheap (~$160 to $210 for a basic machine, I bought another one recently and it was brand new, never been turned on for $205), durable, and come with gigabit NICs. It will be a lot cheaper, if probably less powerful, to just add some expresscard eGPUs to the Thinkpad cluster than try to put together a decent cluster of identical desktop nodes.

3. I want this thing to be very portable so I can share it between two laptops or take it on the road, or let someone I trust borrow it.

4. If this thing fails and is totally unsatisfactory, I'm only out the $65 or so for the power supply and eGPU adapter. I can still use whatever card I buy in my desktop machine. So it's pretty low risk and might get me playing TW3 a lot sooner than waiting to build the desktop up since that's pretty low priority.

5. I want to use the desktop as a Linux server and NAS anyway, and it would be annoying to take the server/NAS offline to boot into Windows every time I want to play a game.

So, thoughts?

^^ Is the PSU to power the express card or the GPU?

The 1050ti doesnt even have a connector for ATX power supply, it draws all the power it needs through the PCI-E slot, so if the laptop PSU can supply that through the express card, it's even easier.

The PSU powers the expresscard adapter, which powers the PCIe slot to (presumably) the 75W standard.

I think you can also draw extra power from the adapter to patch into the card power plug if you use a higher watt card. They spec a 220W power supply, after all. But the documentation was clearly not written by someone with English as a first language, and I figured I'd just use a multimeter to figure out WTF is going on once I get the adapter, if I need more than 75 watts.

150 hours or so in, I finished Witcher 3's Main Quest.

Fuck.

Just ...

Fuck.

Don't think I can play another RPG for quite a while. This fucking thing has destroyed all of it for me.

I'm destroyed, shattered, fucking blown out. This was just amazing, beginning to end. Can't bring myself to do the expansions because I'll just lose another fucking 150 hours running around the joint doing shit. Have to move on, have to get life back.

Only regret was that I would have liked to have banged the rest of the Lodge, even that shorthaired SJW Fringilla.

Spoilers:

Made Ciri the Empress. Restored Temeria. Stayed with Triss. Made Cerys the Queen. Yes, I know this is SJW bullshit, but in the game's world it's about as stable a political situation as I can put together and it keeps Skellige alive. I got a bit detached from the lore right towards the end, but at least Geralt gets to spend the next two hundred years or so not listening to Yennefer's bitching.

Would like to have banged the rest of the Lodge.

Just can't comment any further. It was too fucking good a game.