Games

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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.

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Hasbro is relaunching classic Tiger Electronics gaming handhelds
https://flip.it/Aizft2

When I was a kid, mobile gaming on typically meant one of Tiger‘a handheld games, or a deck of cards. The advantage of the handheld was not needing space, and not having to clean up.

Much as I was greatly attracted to the idea of a Game Boy, as a consequence of those games, I would expect few people would retroactively switch from their phone to whatever modern incarnations look like.

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On one hand, I find it a little perturbing when a game doesn’t work with Steam Link, and it used to work fine.

On the other, I also figure that not only is it a non Steam game: it was developed for Windows 9x, and targets 640×480 VGA, so I probably can’t complain when the rendering and the mouse wrapping disagrees on where the cursor and the window are.

lol

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https://apple.news/AC4plCt9URGKT3kiyM3yN0Q

I think that aiming for the $400 range would be more logical for Sony. Microsoft m really doesn’t need the Series X to be the Xbox everyone buys. Because they’ll still be able to sell you a One S, or whatever the Series S becomes, for those who don’t need the horsepower as much as they want the catalog of games.

Or at least, my expectations based on the Xbox One’s evolution, is that even the original model will likely continue to run many games for the foreseeable future. They just won’t look so sexy. Likewise the One X in the middle isn’t toothless, nor would I expect sold out.

Personally, my interest in the Series X is mostly based on graphics fidelity. I have little concern for what resolutions games on my Xbox offer, for two principal reasons. Firstly, they look fine on my 2160p TV, which is to say a freaking lot better than older consoles targeting 480i; and Secondly, if I really wanted better graphics I’d throw a big assed GTX at the problem instead of a console.

For the price tag, I didn’t really see much point in the One X. 4K resolution is appreciated, but not that big a deal to me. The data posted so far on the Series X on the other hand, suggests there is going to be a big enough leap in raw power that games can take advantage of this for better graphics, not just tone it back to 720p ~ 1080p. What would be worth the upgrade to me, is headroom for eye candy rather than focusing on the pixel counts.

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Myst is a classic game that I missed. Also one that I should probably dig up someday and play.

The technical challenges faced aside, I kind of wonder how many computer users had CD-ROM drives by then. Another wonder of an era that I missed, since my family’s computer was still a single 5 1/4” diskette machine at that time. Actually discounting the CD-ROM, it was kind of amazing when we finally got a hard drive equipped Pentium computer in the very late ‘90s, and it wasn’t good enough for playing games much more complex than Battle Zone and Asteroids, because Windows 98 took up most of the drive, lol.