An orange in an apple orchard
Seen “Hi Score Girl” on Netflix yet?
Reminder seeing this listed a good while ago and filling it under “Watch later, maybe.”
Many of the games depicted flash my brain back to my childhood. There’s more than a few, probably most of the ones shown that either landed American Genesis and SNES releases. Not to mention the reoccurring bits of Street Fighter II; which probably was the fighting game my brother and I played the most of in the early ’90s.
This reminds me: my hand me down GTX 780 fell into that price range when it was young, back in ’13. Far from New the old ‘780 still kicks more than a little ass at plowing through games. I’m also inclined to believe most of my issues with FVXV’s performance are due to my processor not aging equally as well, since the stutters revolved around my Core i5 spiking to 100% usage.
And that’s exactly why you would pay such a fortune for a top dog GPU: because you won’t have to buy a new one for quite a freaking while. 2019 – 2013 = 6 years and only now showing signs of age.
Personally, I’m more interested in what follows the GTX 16 / RTX 20 thing. But cards at that level have very long service lives to match the ludicrous price tags. Pretty much regardless of generation. By the time such cards age out it is because the mid ranged cards have finally caught up quite a few years later or because of more Direct 3D and driver level advancements leaving you in the dust; which isn’t so often.
Circuit Breaker: A brief history of cutdown game consoles.
While only brief in that it’s limited to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft: the modern names in the console gaming business, it is never the less a good write up.
I also find it interesting how times have changed. The way I encounter such revision has changed more than the patterns too the hardware alterations.
The alterations to the earlier NES and PlayStation consoles were things that I first encountered in stores, or later read about (PS2 Slim) after the fact. Seeing such things in stores were head scratching events. More recent history such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 iterations are principally things I’ve only encountered online because I skipped much of that generation. Current affairs like the One S are both things I’ve usually read about online ahead of time and have also encountered personally.
Growing up, I was pretty much exposed to everything Nintendo and Sega offered in the United States until the great dominance the Sony PlayStation achieved, and I mostly exited mobile while the Game Boy Color was still getting new titles.
Somewhere in the early 2000s, I kind of made a switch away from consoles. If they interested me: I would still buy games for the PlayStation 2. But by in large my gaming activities became focused on PC. Thus while my peers were typically (original) Xbox converts: I had returned to the desktop. Up until the late ’90s our PC was limited to MS-DOS 3 and a single 5 ¼ floppy drive, so it wasn’t hard for consoles like the Super NES and original PlayStation to ingrain themselves in my gaming habits and draw me away from our Tandy. Around when Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was young and popular: we finally gained a PC up to playing modern games. That remained the pattern and is again my norm.
It was actually my brief but multi year affair with the first model Xbox One, that I had experienced a console younger than the launch model PlayStation 2. Platforms like the 360 and PS3 are ones I either skipped totally or only experienced through games ported to PC or Xbox One backwards compatibility.
Seems the popularity of game consoles hasn’t stagnated over the decades. Changes to make the hardware cheaper as the platform ages of still the norm. But the way that I learn about them has.
On the flip side it seems like the hardware reliability has also largely remained the same, since Deathstar One remains fully operational. Despite its growing age and my focus returning to PC. Underneath my Xbox One is a Steam Link and a PlayStation 2, non slim. The PS2 still works just as well as the Christmas I first played Ghost Recon on it. Ditto for the GameBoy Color in my closet, sitting next to a Pokemon Blue and Yellow cartridge. This stuff tends to last 😁. Although I do wonder when analog A/V inputs will disappear from televisions, lol.
When it comes to the PC port of FFVIII, I imagine that there’s only two views to take of the train mission. Either its creator was a kind soul for giving you plenty of time, or your mind might flash to Robin Williams’ line in Mrs. Doubtfire about the masochistic bastard who invented high heels, and picturing some game porter with a set of nine inch heels jammed up their butt.
My simple solution to the translation problem:
numeric code -> on screen key map -> actual controller map
Is to configure the game’s keyboard settings to use 1, 2, 3, 4 for the specified actions. Taking advantage of the fact that the game basically requires the same number of buttons the original GameBoy worked with.
While the button miss-ordering is apparently a known issue with the port, I rather hope that the U.S. PlayStation release didn’t have a similar grumble to it, lol.
Rubba dub, dub! Rub that magic lamp and have a long ass, brutual, determined to drag his ass out for a fight until the bring of death and beyond.
After rubbing the lamp it wasn’t long before Zell fell, and Selphie mid battle. All the GFs fell before Diablos’ mighty gravity area of affect pretty promptly, so I effectively got stuck having to widdle his health down with basic strikes. Blinding him at least limited his ability to spam AoE *and* lunge a fighter to prompt death but didn’t really help with the endless stream of gravity strikes. Losing the healer lead to trading draw-cast-cures and sword strikes, after losing the ability to tag team DPS him between cure cycles. A steady flow based on draw-cast-curing my way to survivle between his area of effect spams.
In the end, expecting to lose my head, a quick scan revealed the drowsy beast was down to about 700 HP. Shouting “WHO DARES, WINS!”, I rather picked my ass off the floor and went back to buisness–working in as many magic strikes as I could.
For better or worse determination doesn’t tend to be my problem in clearing part of a game.
After learning enough of Final Fantasy VIII’s battle system to beat the bastard upon the communications tower, it felt rather rewarding to watch Elvoret go down. In fact I kinda think he was designed for that: because enough force is required to beat your way through Briggs / Wedge / Elvoret that if you’ve just winged it and puttered about, to flatten Elvoret you’ll have to be doing something right or your party will eventually fall.
And then of course once you’ve got him cut down to size: got thirty minutes to reach the extraction point, and a big assed robotic spider whose first encounter makes him invincible until you flee. That just figures. Because after finally having that victory, why not force the player to run like hell and if they’re effective, manage to blow the still-even-more-hit-point-bastard to kingdom come as he chases you to the beaches: or let the attractive Quistis do it with a machine gun ^_o.
Yes. Somehow this follow up just seems appropriate to me. On the flip side it doesn’t take for freaking ever. Like the massive Dungeon Crawl that can occur in Dragon Age: Origins if you decide nope, not killing the little possessed tike, but haven’t helped the Mages with their little cluster fuck…. I seem to remember tackling that castle going from “Eh, should take a break soon” over to “Alright, just how many dungeons was this crawl?”; If memory serves it was three or four depending on how you view the castle, the circle, and the occasional trips to the land of freaky things.
Actually, one of these days I really should revisit DA:O. It was probably the first RPG game that I really got into and enjoyed the ever loving crap out of rather than getting bored after a few hours.
Strange things: when you start running out of Final Fantasy XV content, and start debating between VI, VII, VIII, XIII as a future target.
Maybe this is what I get for skipping out on the entire series as a kid instead of keeping up with it :P.
Before playing #15, I think the closest I ever really got to any of the games was a short demo of one of the side entries during the PlayStation era. A long, long time ago #7 was kind of just there but despite its success wasn’t really popular in the circles I ran with back then. Nor (J)RPGs in general, I suppose.
Fire Support: noun; when a Astral the size of a skyscraper picks you up like an action figure and smites the area from orbit.
I found the dungeon of the old wizard guy a touch unimaginative compared to the first Astral encounter with Titan but I have to admit that the whole nuke the area with his staff thing makes Ramuh rather handy. Especially if one of FFXV’s hunts is carrying on too long, hehehe.
Some thoughts on long term planning,
At this point the kind of off machine that fits my “I’m done, that’s close enough” form adds up to about $1,500 if you shop off the rack. But that means 2 kilos of luggable with a GTX1650, a Thunderbolt expansion port and non soldered memory for its upgrade path. Something less awesome could be found quite a bit cheaper if combined with +$300 worth of eGPU dock but that usually means giving up something like the ability to reuse my ginormous SSD or having to suffer 8 GB of soldered on system memory, and aforementioned eGPU dock would be a prerequisite for handling games, as far as cheaper notebooks go.
Frugality makes me look at future upgrades for my desktop.Where good old Centauri principally hits her limits are games like Final Fantasy 15 and Resident Evil 7. Games that either hit harder than normal or that you wish had more fine tuning put into them, lol.
A trend that will only continue over the next 5 years of her extended life–I have already exceeded the retirement age I had designed Centauri for, and am tempted to see just how far she keeps on truckin’. Because while showing the signs of age: Centauri has been a superb machine.
Replacing the Core i5-3570K with a Core i7-3770K would cost about $200 and deliver a major CPU bump. On the downside this would mean a really nice processor goes to /dev/closet. But the crunch boost would probably last another lustrum quite easily.
A modern Core i5-9400F would deliver comparable enough crunch power for about the same costs when factoring in the motherboard replacement it would need. But then it’s + $75~$100 more for making the generational leap in memory. On a machine originally built for 8 GB and retrofitted to 12 GB when her older sister retired; needless to say forward motion is 16. And that would tally about $300 between processor, motherboard, and memory.
On the flipside one can find pretty decent deals on the GTX 1660 Ti and original RTX 2060 for between $300 and $400. Both solve one of the limits of my antique GTX 780 which is being limited to only 3 GB of graphics memory.
While my general suspicion for RE7’s performance issues vs RE2 running quite smooth has been expecting my processor to be the bottleneck, in FFXV I am running virtually full of VRAM all the time. So much so that I wonder if many of the performance dings align with the allocator trying to decide which textures to flush and which to keep. or if the game was designed to maximize usage. Performance drops often coincide with with the games FPS overlay showing graphics memory usage at holy crap full levels, relative to the near constantly full levels.
Hmm, think I’ll screw around with FFXV’s benchmarking program.
Kotaku: How To Get Into Final Fantasy XIV In 2019.
Unsure if exactly the article I should read or if exactly one to run away from……