Amazon Game Deals: Xbox digital titles, PC cases, and more
Life is Strange and the Tomb Raiders are particularly good value for the sale.
Games
Thoughts on Xbox Game Pass and SteamLink
One of the perks of Steam, is the ease of continuing from anywhere.
Most games on Steam with more than ten cents worth of effort, support cloud saves. Most that don’t tend to be very old, or games that shouldn’t. Which makes it pretty easy to continue from another machine, or even the same machine from some future reinstall of the game. Many games on Xbox also support cloud saves, and it’s usually less famous titles that lack them, like indie titles.
At least when you’ve got a solid graphics card, and aren’t struggling to run the game to begin with, Steam’s in home streaming actually works great. So transitioning from /dev/desk to /dev/couch is more to do with input devices.
Microsoft’s Game Pass is pretty sweet, and ultimate makes sense if you were already paying for Live. But the trade off I think is the portability.
When I play a game on Steam: principally, I give little mind to whether I’m playing from my couch or in front of my computer. The decision is typically driven by how much precision mouse/keyboard work is required. The only game that’s been otherwise is Final Fantasy 15, as my CPU struggles to run it locally, unlike 99% of my other Steam games.
When I play a game on Game Pass, principally my thought is “Do I want to play at my xbox?”.
As much as I applaud Microsoft’s record and stream tech, I really love that they made it available, the truth is that I find the stream quality from my Xbox to my desktop to be inferior to my 780 GTX to my SteamLink over the same network and locations. There’s more visual glitches and even set for quality, the encoder can’t best the encoder on my nVidia card.
What would really make the PC side of that coin mean something, is if it were possible to share the same saves between my desktop and my Xbox. I.e. the decision would be like open Outer Worlds on my desktop, and continue from the same save I made on my Xbox. I’d call that a win.
By contrast the decision works out that I started playing on my Xbox, and need to stream to my PC if I want to play at my desk. Which means a loss of image quality, and the occasional wtf/freeze/lag; on the flipside Outer Worlds seems to do that less often than Halo 5 when I stream.
Likewise, I don’t think Microsoft offers the inverse. I.e. that I could stream my desktop to my Xbox, if I had started with the PC, I’d not be able to stream to my Xbox. Although it might be possible to horse wrangle something with my SteamLink. By contrast, Steam’s streamy goodness is basically from anything to anything, especially when you account for needing a Direct3D PC for most games anyhow.
Thus, I am finding that Game Pass is very worth it for the Xbox side of the catalog. On PC, it’s more like a “Meh”, because the only benefit I’m really seeing there is good odds of playing on desktop with a mouse, a game I wouldn’t want to play on console with a controller. To be fair though, my decision was based on the cost comparison of Game Pass + Live versus Game Pass Ultimate; that is to say on the dollars required.
Beyond the lack of PC <-> Xbox crossover, I’m finding Game Pass to be very worth it. For a while, I’ve actually considered dropping my Live subscription because Games with Gold doesn’t bring that many games of interest down the pike, versus how little multiplayer I tend to do on Xbox. Where as Game Pass delivers the content, and probably curtails much of the need to buy games outright.
I’m also pretty sure that if Valve offered something like Game Pass on Steam, I’d probably hand Gabe Newell my checkbook and be done with it, lol.
On one hand: I try to respect how much care seems to have gone into Steam’s controller. Whether it was an internal Valve team or an external, some real TLC was put into its design.
On the other hand: trying to use it makes me feel like I’ve had a frontal lobotomy, and don’t really feel like my brain cells can ever adjust to it versus a normal controller. Where normal is probably anything in the vein of a PlayStation or Xbox (modern) or Super Nintendo or Genesis (classic) controller.
Yeah, I think it’s going to end up in /dev/closet. Unless someday they’re worth something on eBay.
The point at which even I stop playing: crashes of no continue.
When I originally tried playing Deadly Premonition, I stopped because it was impossible to get out of the hospital without crashing.
Revisiting the game with the current brew of fixes posted in Steam Guides, I found that less of a pickle. So much as it seems the game fires off an exit after x time, almost as if it keeps leaking resources or something. Faster while driving and mapping than wondering around the shadow world.
And then, I save at the community center, go walk the dog, come back, and find the game silently crashes to desktop the moment it is done loading my save file :'(.
This reminds me that the ‘360 version is like $15 in the used game bin. I’d like to hope the backwards compatibility and old release, suck less than the PC port that was pushed to Steam and GOG.
Watching Doom: Annihilation on Netflix, I think it doesn’t suck. You won’t rush to theaters for such a film but it beats the last attempt at a DooM movie, hands down. Or should we say, the people at least cared and that tends to make a video game movie that doesn’t suck.
In my experience, video game movies tend to be either pretty good, or pretty awful, and make no one happy. The only exception that really come to mind is the first Mortal Kombat film.
Doom: Annihilation at least does a decent job of presenting a band of doomed space marines, stuck on Phobos, and being attacked by zombies. Also other things. Like the ’16 video game, it tries to put enough narrative around the concept to make it function. Not a deep, far reaching story; because that doesn’t work for Doom. This film on the other hand, ain’t a bad try. I especially loved the many nods to the game, and related Id titles; not to mention bits like the possession warning on the doors.
I’d actually like to see another shot, that takes on Doom II’s notion of the Earth being overrun. It may also be sad that the only reasons why I remember the name of Mars’ moons all related to video games, lol.
In the real world: I would call hacking away at stone with a sword, a waste of a sword.
In The Witcher: I’d say going Darth Vader on a golem is damned exhausting. Properly positioned up and buffed, using a mixture of sword strikes and signs took forever to fight The Sentry.
Actually, if I had known the pylons would remain interactible during the battle, I probably would have tried the lightening trick the wiki mentions.
While I will admit, my main plans for Christmas involved video games, looking at my Steam wishlist sorted by price, the feeling is more like “Fuck me with a snowman, fuck me harder”.
Over the years, I generally made it a rule to only participate, much, in one of the major steam sales per year. In the past few years, I’ve mostly tried to avoid them all. But even an ostrich with his head buried in the sand can’t avoid them indefinitely…
A snowman makes a good frosty dildo, right?
Well, it has taken a good sweet time but I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.
Earlier this year, I replaced Centauri’s system drive. Going from the first small SSD I ever bought, to a shiny 1 TB able to replace its hard drive. Since then, I’ve largely migrated all data over from the hard drive.
My plans for the now redundant storage capacity has been to fix the actual thorn in my storage side. Since repurposing my best portable drive to deal with my laptop’s backups, my xbox has had to make due with an old and extremely slow 300G laptop drive for its external drive. One that sucks so much that it actually makes Deathstar One’s internal 500G look sexy, and the original Xbox Ones are not equipped with sexy drives.
Hauling Centauri out was mostly leg work rather than effort. The only real pain in the arse is that the gigabit cable doesn’t have enough extra length for me to “Pull” the tower out, rather I need to connect/disconnect the cable before moving the tower more than an inch or so from final resting place next to the wall. Yeah, bollocks to that.
Of course plugging the drive into one of my spare enclosures is as easy peasy as pulling out the screw driver set; it helps that I kept one spare within quick reach and my second spare in deep storage, last time I redid /dev/closet.
Now the real irksome ribbon was the Xbox. It decided to disavow all knowledge of how to format the sucker. Because Microsoft in all their glory, eventually decided there should be a ~200M magic partition ahead of the NTFS volume. And Xbox, no likely. Enter Linux powered laptop, GNU parted, and cursing at HDMI cables finally falling out the back of Deathstar One (>_<).
In theory, by morning most of the data should now be transferred over to it. Allowing me to decommission the 300G laptop drive to virtually anything but video game storage, and it’ll be nice not running 97+++++ percent full all the frickin’ time.
Even my lazy ass can get around to juggling parts around if you piss me off enough.
With MechWarrior 5 finally launching, I find myself torn.
On one hand: a decent MechWarrior game basically guarantees that I’ll pry open my wallet and fork over the cash. And there’s few enough games in the past twenty years that fit that definition for me.
But on the other hand: my policy towards Epic exclusives tend to be No Steam Version Equals No Purchase. Of course, someone had to go and test this resolve by launching the kinda game I’ve been waiting eons for….. bastards.
The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo
I’d really like to imagine that the banker must have shit himself when Bergsten bro he’s the topic of the 10,000 units. But I reckon things turned out pretty well for everyone in the end, lol.