Games

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Taking a quick stab at the Resident Evil 3 Demo, I’m kind of thrilled to see that it remains the kind of awesome that the remake of Resident Evil 2 was in terms of game play, mechanics, and general design flow.

Combined with the release of Doom Eternal, of course, I am rather tempted. And know the virtues of hiding my wallet….lol

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The Xbox’s plugs and ports, a visual history.

Nice little view, IMHO.

I pretty much ignored the original Xbox. At the time, I had a Play Station 2 and a PC. By the time the Xbox 360 came out: I had already converted to PC games. So the first iteration of Xbox One was the first time that I actually used one.

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Microsoft unveils full Xbox Series X specs with 1TB expansion cards.

So in short they’ve addressed my two real wishes on the hardware front, and jacked up the horse power for tomorrow’s video games.

One of the things I dislike about the original Xbox Ome controller is that it uses MicroUSB, and I’ve largely migrated to USB-C over a slow process of attrition. My controller is one of the few things I still use that calls for a Micro-B connection.

Something I’ve coped with is the storage situation. 500 GB of doesn’t totally suck 2.5” SATA drive is able to deliver load times that aren’t overly comical, but is quite a bit too small when major games are often 30~60 GB each. A decent 1 TB drive on the USB-A ports has made a world of difference.

Beyond that I’ve been pretty happy with how the original hardware platform worked out.

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Exploring around the Xbox (beta) app for a long while, I found it curious how scroll performance eventually tanked. By the time it became barf worthy, I noticed that one of the processes in its group was marked as around 2 GB. It also persists across coding and opening the GUI.

Exiting the system tray reduced it to about 2~3 something MB for the process group in taskmgr. Playing around, it looks like shifting between the list of games in category view and opening them for the detailed store view causes memory to go up, and be largely hung onto after returning to the list.

Ahh, the joys of memory leaks: and the reminder that even Microsoft ships more than a few bugs. For the Xbox used for Game Pass, at least is flagged as beta quality. Even if it looks like a resource sucking monster compared to something like Valve’s Steam client.

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Having finished The Outer Worlds, I’m reminded of the last time I enjoyed an RPG that much. It was probably Dragon Age: Origins. Which are very different genres: Outer Worlds is a science fiction shooter set in a caricature world; Origins was a sword and spell tactical game set in a fantasy world.

There’s two really specific ways the games connect in my mind, aside from the level of fun.

One of the things I rather enjoyed is the open ended way of conversing. In both OW and DA, you can pretty much respond to given situation how you want. Will your interactions be kind hearted, greedy, or antagonistic? It’s up to you. While some games insert hilarious options, The Outer Worlds, like Dragon Age: Origins: is very consistent in this execution of choice. Down to the point that it may as well be a running gag being able to introduce yourself as the former captain of The Unreliable instead of yourself. Plus there’s the case of choices that actually make a difference, and party interaction.

Another is the Not Another Sandbox Thing. I really enjoyed the Elder Scroll games, for an example. But the 2000s will probably be best remembered as the era of sandbox games, and when shooters traded the dozen guns in your back pocket for MMO-like skill attributes. But I don’t really like “Open world” sandboxes as a game design. I find that they often cause a lose of focus, and in many games not made by Really Big Makers Of Games, it often feels more like a copout rather than a benefit. In fact even when it’s made by big fish it still feels that way quite often. By contrast, Outer Worlds and Dragon Age: Origins are more like a series of small contained environments. You get the open-world aspects of being able to choose where you go, and how you go questing. But you’re not dumped in a sandbox and left to wander around. I find this lends a greater focus to problem solving, and questing.

Pretty tersely: The Outer Worlds is probably the best modern RPG game that I’ve played in quite a while.

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Halo’s developers explain what can go wrong with unlocked framerates in old game ports

It’s also worth remembering that these kind of weird ass behaviors and bugs can occur on games  natively developed for PCs. Older games often have to cope with hardware that is faster than anyone imagined, and totally different from what the game was developed on.

A prime problem that comes to mind is the flying APC bug in MW3. On my older Pentium D machine, APCs would often fly up into the air and usually come back down. On my Core i5 machine: they never would come back down, or even be within targeting range most of the time. Which makes it hard to complete some of the early missions, lol. Today you require limiting the CPU speed and emulating a graphics card in software just to render it playable on modern hardware.

In fact, the game was old enough that when my eyes lit up at finding a copy of Mech Warrior 3: the next problem to solve was convincing the clerk to sell it to me because there was no returns welcomed, lol. I seem to recall Pentium 3s and Pentium IIs being high end processors around the time the game was released.

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Nintendo has a cloud problem

While from a distance, I think Nintendo has done pretty well to modernize themselves: the fact remains that they’ve still got a long way to go.

Sony has evolved considerably since the PlayStation arrived in the ‘90s. I don’t think anyone ever envisioned how successful that would go. But personally, part of my choice of the Xbox One over the PlayStation 4, comes to being a third party that looked upon PS3’s account and service bits as reasons why I never want to give Sony my billing information.

Microsoft by contrast has been in computer and network crap for virtually ever, as far as PCs go. For what they sometimes lack in the gaming scene, they make up for in being competent at running consumer services where you give them money for it.

Nintendo on the other hand, don’t have a long record of fancy smancy consumer services or backend infrastructure for all of that. It’s increasingly part of modern gaming, but it’s just not their bread and butter. The Switch seems to represent a major leap forward in their thinking, but it’s still a Nintendo.