Games

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Looks like Prey is on sale for $6 over on Steam, or about $8 with both expansion packs.

Can’t say that the game especially tempted me on release but the reviews I’ve read over the years made me consider, might be worth playing. I suppose atg this price and when you make it the PC version, it’s a bit hard to pass up.

Despite my times with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox One, I can’t say that I have ever cared much for using a controller for shooters. For many games, yeah a controller is both fine and kinda nice. But the more precise speed and accuracy becomes necessary: the more I want a mouse ^_^.

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TheGamer: The 10 Toughest Boss Fights In The Metal Gear Solid Franchise, Ranked.

While I agree with the last one, I’m not so sure I agree with the rest.

To be honest the battle against Fatman is the number one reason I don’t revisit MGS2. I played that game very heavily and acquired more than a few dog tags in my mastery of Solid Snake Sneekery back when it was a young game. But I reflect upon how the old games were and how frustrating that speeding bastard was, and view it as the biggest challenge to actually completing the game.

You can probably tell that I don’t like bomb timers very much 😝.

When I originally played Snake Eater I probably would have considered The End the third biggest challenge amongst the games bosses. But having played through a few times, I’ve generally found that to be more one of strategy. Let’s face it: engaging The End in a sniper battle is cool but not productive. The controls and visuals being what they are, my preferred strategy was hunt him down and assaulting with automatic weapons and explosives. Because it’s a lot easier than seeing the camouflaged old bastard in the jungle. Especially if you’ve gone from a tube TV to a modern 4K, and are still stuck with 480i! Fighting this way makes it much less cool but also much more easily accomplished.

By contrast the battle with Quiet was much easier and actually fun. I owe this to two real factors. Metal Gear Solid V is built more like a shooter where as Metal Gear Solid III and prior were built more like RPGs: it’s just damned easier to engage in a sniper battle. Being faced with the wide open terrain also makes it a lot easier than finding The End. With Quiet it is more a matter of hitting first than hitting at all.

Metal Gear has always been known for its boss battles, and it’s rather eccentric boss characters.

The first right with Vulcan Raven is actually one of my favorites. See, when I played MGS for the very first time: that was about as far as I got. Coming back some years and around 300 VR missions later: I unleashed hell upon the bastard and his M1 tank. Being called a demon for taking down an Abrams main battle tank almost bear handed in that situation was something I relished. Because that was around the crossing point in my life when I actually got to be good at clearing games like MGS. Ironically thought, I have never completed the original Metal Gear Solid.

Fuck you, Colonel Volgin 🖕.

Most of MGS3’s boss fights are more a nuisance in retrospect but Volgin is a pain in my arse. Mostly due to how the checkpointing interacts with kicking his saddist ass in the CQC and his various special moves as the bout progresses. It’s the kind of fight that you’ll either find easy or very hard; me I find it very tiresome.

Fighting The Boss was without a doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever done in Metal Gear. The first time I cleared Snake Eater, I must have fought Boss for hours in that beautiful field. But it isn’t just about the right to the death, oh no. I think of all the things I’ve seen and done in Metal Gear: the story of The Boss influenced me the most.  Because Metal Gear Solid 3: Operation Snake Eater is as much our story as it is hers. We experience the birth of Big Boss through the death of The Boss. But in the aftermath we get to see all the threads unravel, and if you paid deep attention the threads run very deep. MGS3 and it’s narrative struck a deeper cord with me than any other in the series ever has.

Actually that makes me remember, her code name in The Cobras was The Joy, wasn’t it? Yes, I think it was.

RIP, Boss.

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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.

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Wccftech: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Benchmark Leaks Out, Almost Titan V Tier Performance For $699 US.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.