While playing DooM on Xavier, eventually I found my speakers through the dock resetting every few minutes. Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the system having a problem or because of using Chocolate-Doom as a Flatpak. But nope, just an old familiar pain.
Mar 11 01:51:11 xavier kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* Atomic update failure on pipe A (start=115216 end=115217) time 161 us, min 1192, max 1199, scanline start 1188, end 1200
Actually, compared to what great fun Skylake’s Gen 9 graphics chips were to fuck with when they first came out, I probably should count myself lucky that this machine’s Xe / Gen 12 based stuff has been relatively stable under KDE/Wayland. Also in retrospect that nothing went worse than the audio getting cut off.
Playing through Resident Evil: Requiem, so far I’m rather enjoying the game’s choice to split it down the middle. In the RE2 remake, we really got the anti-zapping system. I kind of liked the inverted routes since it avoids all the headache of the original games zapping system, which I always considered more of a grumbly puzzle than a good idea.
By contrast, having both Grace and Leon get a blood-soaked, zombie riddled trip through Victor’s facility gels well. The campaign alternates perspectives rapidly enough that it avoids the need for a log book or cursing yourself for ammo shortages, yet also yields a balance. It feels more like the campaigns compliment each other rather than compete, or make it a jumble. The way they take such different focuses, also feels like an effort to merge the gameplay that attracted folks like me to the RE2/RE3 remake and those more used to games like either version of RE4/RE5.
On the flip side, I also find it an enjoyable characterization. Grace, despite how much negative feedback she’s generated, I think actually makes a good protagonist. Compared to our returning hero, she’s about as prepared for this as The Lone Gunmen. Her reactions are far more that of a normal person. Yet, she still exhibits the strength to get up and keep fighting. And then of course we have Leon whose attitude like older players, are more been there, done that, got the t-shirt when things go awry. I also somehow managed to appreciate the awesome jumpscare in tunnels, which just so happened to align with me commenting out loud about being surprised by the lack of anything happening there 😆.
Much like earlier games, the folks behind Resident Evil have some faulty ideas of physics and technology. The meat grinder and chainsaws for one. I’m sure there will be others, but assuming it’s not as outlandish as RE6, I’ll probably continue to ignore that. It’s an RE game, you eventually know what to expect when things just make no damned sense.
Hoozah! Sounds like this one collects all the games that I never got to play.
MGS4: Guns of the Patriots was a PlayStation 3 release, making sure that I never got more than the story synopsis–so I’m definitely glad to see it hit PC. MGS: Peace Walker by contrast was a PlayStation Portable release, which is another device that I never had. Ghost Babel being released for the GameBoy Color makes it one of the few gaming portable devices I actually own, but I never came across the game back when GameBoy games were readily available.
Needless to say, short of Metal Gear Solid getting the same treatment that Snake Eater got with Delta, this is some of the best Metal Gear news I’ve had in a while :).
Increasingly, I’ve been turning my mind to what will come after Rimuru; a machine that was originally built in 2021 using the COVID-19 stimulus as its foundation and the same general design of its predecessor, Centauri. Since then, it has undergone 6 refits between Rimuru experiencing a motherboard failure in addition to ordinary tech updates.
Simply put, the status quo for the last few years has been that only one slot on the board is still functional, and the intention was that there would be no third motherboard if it fails. Combined with what is now a 5-year-old Core i7, the single slot of RAM has proven to be the key bottleneck. Ironically, getting Oblivion: Remastered to run was more an exercise in getting the GPU load to a point where the CPU isn’t pegging out.
It’s also been a downside that between the old CPU being well loaded and the Big-Assed-GPU both cranked up practically turn the machine into a space heater. I decided the machine to handle sustained load while keeping system thermals under control. The catch-22 of course, is I can easily find myself sitting in a room that climbs towards +10 degrees after a long spell of gaming, like playing Silent Hill f over the weekend.
Following Maleficent, I considered swapping the GPU and NVMe drive over to Zeta, and converting it from a file and virtual machine server over to Rimuru’s successor. That actually was how Centauri had become my previous desktop. Of course, breaking down and cracking the case revealed roughly what expected to be with that plan: I could fit the PSU and the cooling system, or I could fit the GPU. Zeta’s PSU would be able to handle ‘technically’ fitting and powering Rimuru’s RTX 4070 Ti, but would require removing the liquid cooling system to accommodate the PSU. So, that plan failed.
One of my long-term plans over the past lustrum or so has been that Rimuru would likely be my last conventional “Desktop PC.” I’ve never really been a believer in gaming laptops, but it here we are.
Christened Ranga, since its job is to blow Rimuru away. Amusingly, using Oblivion: Remastered as a point of reference it delivers similar performance but the opposite bottleneck. Rather than being CPU bound, Ranga is GPU bound, but still firmly lands in the realm of pick your frame rate. Closer to 30 at Ultra/4K or closer to 60 at Medium/4K, and a pretty slick 40s-50s at High/4K.
A bit of rewiring all the things, and my dock is now situated underneath the monitor rather than within a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable length of the desktop. Somehow, the part that bothers me about this arrangement is that a 2 meter long active Thunderbolt 5 cable cost about the same as my shorter TB3/TB4 cables did, while being rated for 80 Gbps/240W, far higher than my dock can handle. On the flip side, for cooling purposes a small stand was necessary to ensure proper ventilation.
In tests so far, I’m finding that the Zephyrus G14 is a sufficient match. Its RTX 5070 Ti mobile just can’t match the horsepower of the RTX 4070 Ti desktop, but it comes close enough that no loner being bottlenecked on the Core i7-10700K and single slot resolve that pickle. It’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 both represent a major generational leap in performance, and while the RAM remains comparable, it isn’t so limited: so yay for being back to dual channel memory!
As an added benefit, when putting Shion in place to be my primary computer, I no longer have the problem of not being able to see where the fuck the port is, since it’s no longer facing the wall. I kind of liked having my laptop off to the side as previous, but the occasions where I actually use my laptop as a notebook PC make it grumble some to reconnect. More so than swapping between TB cables at the dock. Now? It’s simply swap laptops in the stand, a single cable running to the dock.
Another benefit is proving to be the heating. The Zephyrus G14 is very rapid to crank its fans into high-gear when gaming, to the point that one might want noise canceling headphones rather than speakers for some content. But it doesn’t raise the room’s ambient temperature as drastically as my desktop, and frankly, the late generation MacBook Pro 16s had louder fans :-P.
Random find located in the crossing point between “What the frak did I just watch” and “Damn, that was awesome.” But I think I’ve gotta lean in the latter.
While I’m almost sad to see the era of Baldur’s Gate 3 major patches end, given how they’ve supported and grown the game since early access, but I love the animated short they’ve created to commemorate the final patch.
Especially the ending, and the whole box trick, hehehehehe.
On one hand, I pretty much decided to watch this clip because, “I’m damn tired of seeing this as I scroll by.” That really summarizes how I feel about most of the AI generated yada-yada that pops up whenever I visit YouTube.
On the other hand, it both kind of makes me wish that someone would make a good horror movie adaptation of Resident Evil Village, and makes me want to play the game again….
While I can’t say that RE7 really did it for me, so much as I was glad for more of a return to the game’s roots, I really did enjoy Village. Discounting remakes, Village was probably the best resident evil game since RE4.
Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.
