Games

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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.

Signs you’ve been playing video games too long

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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GameSpot: Nintendo Switch Lite: Price, Release Date, Colors Revealed.

While not as cool as the regular Switch or as cheap as the 2DS / 2DS XL, I kinda like the idea of a cheaper Switch.

I mostly look at the Switch as attractive from two different perspectives.

One is the potential value: yeah it is costly but if you can get out of buying a 3DS and an Xbox or PlayStation that would be a nice excuse. At least that’s how I’d envision selling my mother on such a console or being sold on it if I had kids without fur.

Another is that personally, if I found myself often waiting in line or such pretty regularly: I’d buy a Switch in a heartbeat. But as an adult I’m usually stuck having to do other things that require my attention,a bus travel insufficient in my neck of the woods. So spending on a portable isn’t justified the same way it was when I was a kid.

But I also reflect on my childhood. My last Nintendo was a GameBoy Color that my mother purchased from a pawn shop around the time Pokemon Red & Blue were big handheld titles. A device as expensive as the Switch wouldn’t have been in my family’s means way back when. When I think back to those days, I find it kind of amazing that I had a PlayStation, lol.

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You should be listening to video game soundtracks at work.

Actually this reminds me: I wanted to check out if Google Play Music includes any of the Final Fantasy sound tracks.

I find it curious and appropriate on so many levels that the road trip music in FFXV is pretty much video game music. Usually at work I don’t listen to the kind of tunes you’d find in an RPG. Country, rock, classic, folk, jazz, all sorts of stuff. But I will admit that Dragon Age and Mirror’s Edge sound tracks do show up in my playlists every now and then.

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I would like to think that I’m not the only one whose first, humorous thought was:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. 

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

Come to think of it more than a few years have passed since I red the Space Odyssey books. I do wonder though what we may find out there, even if it’s likely to be far less dangerous than 2061 or The Turing Test depicts. Instead I imagine we’ll just have a lot of scientists and scholars having a decade long think-orgy and that’s probably for the best.