Games

From Rimuru to Ranga

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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.

An RE3 music parody

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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.

Urge to play Resident Evil, rising….

BG3 Patch 8

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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.

Resident Evil Village – 1980s Live-Action Movie

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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.

MGS Delta: Snake Eater

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At last, the date is announced!

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.

Please, Konami, don’t screw this up 🙂

Dino Crisis

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One of those cases of “Remember to check that out” is the news that Dino Crisis and its first sequel are on GOG. As a kid, I was never really that great at Resident Evil. It didn’t really help that the initial U.S. release kinda had borked aiming until the director’s cut and dual shock versions. I was also more of a dinosaurs kid than a zombie fan.

Needless to say, Dino Crisis was probably my next big take on the then-young survival horror genre. One that I actually played quite a bit of and would revisit as a teenager. Compared to the original Resident Evil trilogy, I found Dino Crisis much less stressful and unnerving, and far more curious and mysterious.

Part of me wonders if the plot and setting have held up, or if I’ll just be disappointed. Part of me also wonders if this time, maybe I’ll finish the darn game. :^o

WiBArM

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There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.

One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.

Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.

Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.

Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.

Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.

So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.

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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: ‘I hate you’ — PC Gamer.

I can’t help but giggle snort, and also wonder how many times a piece of 3D accelerator could be defined as fundamentally broken until they redesign something.

For some reason, I’m picturing the evidence as akin to Klaatu taking a chalk to Professor Barnhardt’s blackboard….gah, I’m getting old, aren’t I? 😀