What game(s) are you playing?

[RhynoCZ]

SWAT 3: Tactical Game of the Year Edition (2001, PC) - 8/10

I got this game yesterday on sale. I remember playing it 20 years ago and enjoying it a lot. 20 years ago! Anyway this game shows its age like none other. The graphics are alright for the time, the frame rate is all over the place in HW graphics mode, might be a compatibility issue (in software mode you get flawless performance, but the game looks awful), but IIRC, that's just how the game ran 20 years ago. I am surprised how quickly I got used to the controls though, you use arrow keys for movement, mouse for aiming and shooting, letter ''U'' to use things, the whole functional key set to change equipment and weapons, ''C'' crouch, ''S'' stand... ''1'' - ''9'' to operate the radio. It feels like the whole keyboard is required. Oh, and the ''Come Out With Your Hands Up!'' is on your mouse scroll wheel.

Also, the NPCs have laser sharp aim and when breaching doors many times you have less than a second to react, so let your squad mates do that for you, if you don't want to restart every mission 100x, as one or two shoots and you're down. The cool thing is though, and it was even back then, in each mission the movement and aggression of the NPCs is random. Just like 20 years ago, the 4th mission (Home invasion) turned out to be the one to test my patience, it took me 20 attempts to finish it alive and with respectable results. EDIT: Nope, it gets worse with the Bank mission, now stuck on the Tv studio mission.

NOTE: I just googled the ''performance issues'' and many people play this game on W10 in 4K@60Hz, so there's no need for the ''true to the original'' performance on non Voodoo cards. I shall investigate.

EDIT: Finished! The concept of the NPC movement and aggression being completely random really does add to the game's difficulty and replayability.
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[Easy-X]

Well... I can see why Dragon Rage: Failguard has its critics. Half the characters' dialogue is perfectly adequate fantasy RPG shite but the other half - including the player character - are utter morons

Thing is, you can tell they put a lot of work into it. Pick an elf and your character automatically knows elf history and talking with other elves is a little different. Pick the "how about a hug?" dialogue option and some NPCs don't appreciate being patronised. It's tricky and unpredictable, somewhat like real life

Regardless, your character is an utter moron and rarely does or says anything inciteful. With that in mind, fuck it, lean into it!

https://www.passionweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Never-Go-Full-Retard.jpg

Not in this game Everyone's so used to playing the noble hero, sacrificing all for the greater good it makes a change to just stumble through armed only with a magic staff and double-digit IQ
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Royal Enfield Continental GT 535, Husqvarna Vitpilen 401, Yamaha XSR700, Honda Rebel, Yamaha DT175, Suzuki SV650 (loan) Fazer 600, Keeway Superlight 125, 50cc turd scooter

[RhynoCZ]

Empire of the Ants - Too early to rate (need to invest in my old PC first), but so far I'm very excited about this one. It feels fresh, plays great (I use xbox controller) and looks amazing as well. A very welcome change from the games I've been playing lately.

This is the first game that I got at launch in like 10 years, for the full price. It's an RTS game where you play as an ant leading your insect colony into battles against other insects, with some gathering of the resources and building up nests. It sort of reminds me of the game Pikmin games on Nintendo consoles.

That being said, I got it for my PC and that ''was a mistake''. My PC (i7 7700K, GTX 1070Ti, 16gb RAM) is old now. The first moments in the game ran actually quite well, at low/medium settings, locked it to 30fps for consistency (open frame rate would hover around 40fps anyway). Well, with the first big battles the GTX 1070Ti shows its age, with the frame rate dropping to sub 20 fps. GFX card utilization pegged at 100%, while the CPU barely get above 30%, and I've a plenty of system RAM available...

So, a new GFX card time, I suppose.

NOTE: Googling what does mid-range mean these days, modern gfx cards are very power hungry. It almost feels like the gfx cards manufactures have a deal with the electricity supplier.

NOTE 2: If I get a gfx card where the manufacturer suggests a 650W-700W PSU, will my PC explode with a 600W PSU?
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[Nobby the Bastard]

Ten days to Stalker 2...
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[Easy-X]

[Rob W]

[Easy-X]

AMD RX7600 + EVGA 850W power supply, plenty one would think. TBF I don't 100% know it's the PSU, could be some other safety feature tripping out. The main problem is the AMD software won't flush until file closure so performance logs don't get saved if the PC just shuts off.

It has only happened one time with Mechwarrior 5 Clans. The game *is* a poorly optimised shambles and the best I can do is alt-Tab back and forth to eyeball the numbers. It certainly douses the GPU in petrol and goes at it with a blow-lamp but I'm sure plenty of other games would too All I really discovered was the fan profile from Sapphire is terrible and out of the box the fan only goes to 100% when the GPU is already on fire

MW5 is on pause till I see some decent patches come out and in the meantime I'll carry on with Veilguard.
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Royal Enfield Continental GT 535, Husqvarna Vitpilen 401, Yamaha XSR700, Honda Rebel, Yamaha DT175, Suzuki SV650 (loan) Fazer 600, Keeway Superlight 125, 50cc turd scooter

[RhynoCZ]

[blurredman]

[Easy-X]

[RhynoCZ]

[Nobby the Bastard]

Been waiting for Stalker 2 to finish updating for 4 hours now. How the fuck did it need so many updates when it's only just come out?
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[RhynoCZ]

UPDATE

Empire of the Ants - 8/10 (after 5 hours of gameplay)

I got a new graphics card just to play this game, and I'm glad I did. When the game runs as it should, it's amazing RTS with beautiful visuals and very nice and engaging gameplay as well. I'm still using the Xbox controller. The game is well suited for a gamepad. The combat system is well executed and the battles (so far) don't take too long so you don't need to spend hours and hours to get somewhere. Will see if the gameplay gets repetitive further on.

As for the new graphics card (RTX 4070 Ti super), it is a huge overkill for 4K 60fps gaming. I could play some of the games I own at 4K/60fps like three to four times at the same time. The card's TDP is 285W-290W(?)... I use about 165W in any game I own today and I push everything to the max with 4K RES. I even tried to oversample some games to see 100% utilization and 285-290W indicated, so I could see whether my PSU (FSP HYPER M 600W) is alright with it.

The manufacturer of the card (MSI) recommends 700W PSU for this card. Nvidia says 600W, might be the MSI factory overclock. My PSU does 600W and of that 540W on the 12V+ (GPU). The PSU meeting ''more than 85% efficiency @ typical load'', that's like 459W.
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[Easy-X]

It's overkill now but when I built my system pretty much every game I had instantly got whacked up to "Ultra" but with contemporary games I'm floating between medium and high
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Royal Enfield Continental GT 535, Husqvarna Vitpilen 401, Yamaha XSR700, Honda Rebel, Yamaha DT175, Suzuki SV650 (loan) Fazer 600, Keeway Superlight 125, 50cc turd scooter

[blurredman]

[Nobby the Bastard]

Free with XBox game pass.
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[to v or not to v]

[Nobby the Bastard]

They increased memory requirements to 16 gb and I only have 8 so am awaiting father christmas.
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[RhynoCZ]

Mafia: Definitive Edition (PC) - 6/10 (re-play)

I finished the game before on PlayStation, only tried it again on my PC because I got it on sale in the trilogy bundle. I also wanted to see how it runs on my new GFX card, and it does run flawlessly. Locked 60fps in native 4K with everything set to the max. The game is beautiful, both the graphics and sound are excellent and the cut scenes are one of the best I've seen in a while. The modern gameplay is also nice and entertaining, both the car driving and combat. Motorcycles look nice, but are awful to ride.

That being said, as a big fan of the original Mafia game the new one is also quite disappointing. Sure, it looks great, sure the sound and voice over are top-notch quality and you get modern game mechanics... but the game lacks depth and is also much shorter than the original game. In the new game it feels like 70% of the game time is cutscenes. In the original it was the other way around. Also, even on the hardest difficulty it felt way too easy, and they've made some questionable changes in the scrip as well.
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[to v or not to v]

[RhynoCZ]

Cyberpunk 2077 (PC) - 9.5/10

*The best game to showcase what Nvidia RTX 40 series cards can do.

So, today I got back to Cyberpunk 2077, this time on my PC. I finished the game on the PS5 before and the story, voice acting (English) and gameplay still hold up. As for the visuals and performance, I used to consider the PS5 version to be excellent, well... the current PC version is way ahead of anything that I've ever seen, and it does add to the appeal of the game. I use RTX 4070 Ti Super, i7 7700K, 16GB DDR4, SSD.

Two bits of technology worth knowing about. Path tracing and DLSS. Path tracing generates life like reflections, shadows and illumination. DLSS helps to clean up the path tracing even further and with frame generation and super resolution helps to run all this in 4K (output) at 60+fps, with everything else being set to max (crown density set to low due to i7 7700K not being enough these days). Native 4K with path tracing (or even ray tracing) is a slide show hovering around 10 fps. Comparing directly native 4K and ''DLSS AI magic'' 4K output, on a 32-inch 4K monitor the difference is very subtle and the ''DLSS AI magic'' result is very pleasing + rock solid 60 fps regardless of what's going on the screen. Without the path tracing, native 4K at 60fps is very doable even without DLSS, but once you see what path tracing does, it's hard to go back to rasterized reflections, shadows and illumination.

Sidenote about the ''DLSS AI magic'', I also tried this in the System Shock (2023 remake) and although with the RTX 4070 Ti Super the game does not need it, when applied the gfx card power usage drops from 165W to 75W (4K output, 60fps locked) and I can't really tell a difference in the sharpness and quality of the image. When I played the game using the GTX 1070 Ti I would have the card pegged close to 100% most of the time, exceeding 180W to get 60fps output in 85% res. scale of 4K. Sorcery I say!
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[RhynoCZ]

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024; PC) - 10/10 (EDIT: Finished, definitely the game of the year for me.)

I got the game ''for free'' with the new gfx card, but I'd pay for it anyway.

So, it is a MachineGames studio game and I can tell right away, but that's a good thing. MachineGames are behind all the modern Wolfenstein games, and I've played and genuinely enjoyed them all. Now for the Indiana Jones game, imagine playing one of the modern Wolfenstein games with more puzzles, secrets, quests and side quests in an open-ish world, with platforming using your fists and anything you can pick up to fight more than you ever would in any of the Wolfenstein games... and you obviously get to use the whip as well. The story of the game so far feels like it's based on the original film franchise, but I'm not that familiar with the films. They do use the original actors/their faces though.

As for the performance, I play it on i7 7700K, 16GB DDR4, RTX 4070 Ti Super, SSD. 4K output DLSS quality + frame gen., path tracing ON (life like lights/shadows), settings all to high-ultra... flawless 60fps during gameplay, struggles in cutscenes when the ray tracing is present in any form (45-60fps). The minimum system requirements do suggest at least i7-10700K (8 cores), so that might be it, but I don't know. During gameplay, regardless of what's going on, with no matter how many NPCs, I get rock solid 60fps performance. Poor cutscenes performance might be a bug/feature of the engine. My i7 7700K (stock 4.4GHz) doesn't even reach 75% usage and I've got a plenty of system memory, or at least I'm not using all of it.

EDIT: Oh, and once again, I'm amazed what path tracing does.

EDIT II: As suspected, the frame gen. does not work in the cutscenes, and 60fps at somewhat 4K seems to be a bit too much for the gfx card with all the high-ultra settings and path tracing at the same time, with no AI frames being inserted in-between to improve the perceived frame rate. I hope they'll fix it soon.
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[Easy-X]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard - DELETED

It was getting to the point I was skipping all the dialogue. What's the effing point after that? I quite liked the maps and aesthetic - sorta World of Warcraft meets Fortnite - combat was fun if a little simplistic. What a waste

So then I picked up Dragon's Dogma 2. It leans more to your Skyrim/Dark Souls/Elden Ring grim but realistic environments, a lot more "Open World" than Veilguard. Again, the combat doesn't have much depth but one of the vocations (read: classes) does at least get to wield an effing big Berserk greatsword. Which is nice.

Mostly it's standard RPG fare but DD2 has not one but two USPs. Your NPC party members (Pawns) are multidimensional travellers so when you're not playing they're ostensibly going online to help out other players. Sometimes they return with gifts if the other players think your pawn has acquitted itself particularly well. Oh, and they're unapologetic and vocal sycophants. They consider you, the player, to be the next best thing since sliced bread. Somehow it works, even if they do get a little tetchy sometimes if you don't follow their advice.

The big ticket item though is the monsters. Big monsters. Really effing big. The smallest is probably an ogre ~20ft tall and you can attempt to clamber up them (while they try and shake you off) and you can try and chop off a limb. It's more efficient just to go for the neck but technically it's possible although the best I've managed is chopping the snake tail part off a Chimera.

Criticisms. It doesn't feel like a massive variety in the number of enemies but I guess other games have spoilt us a bit these days. And the dialogue. Yes, I prefer the faux-Shakespearian over Veilguard's F-bombs but historically people never said "I thank ye, ser!" The 'y' was a substitute for the thorn character absent from the first printing presses so instead it should be "I thank thee, ser!"

I forgive you, Capcom
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Royal Enfield Continental GT 535, Husqvarna Vitpilen 401, Yamaha XSR700, Honda Rebel, Yamaha DT175, Suzuki SV650 (loan) Fazer 600, Keeway Superlight 125, 50cc turd scooter

[blurredman]

STALKER: Lost Alpha.

Trying to get through it. It's a long slog. Played the original three but 10 years ago I downloaded and started this (had to stop early on as PC wasn't powerful enough) and then carried on my playthrough briefly in 2022 but at the minute i'm starting to pick it back up again. No wonder so much stuff was removed from the final release of Shadow of Chernobyl though!
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CBT: 12/06/10, Theory: 22/09/10, Module 1: 09/11/10, Module 2: 19/01/11
Past: 1991 Honda CG125BR-J, 1992 (1980) Honda XL125S, 1996 Kawasaki GPZ500S, 1979 MZ TS150.
Current: 1973 MZ ES250/2 - 18k, 1979 Suzuki TS185ER - 10k, 1981 Honda CX500B - 91k, 1987 MZ ETZ250 (295cc) - 40k, 1989 MZ ETZ251 - 50k.

[Fat Angry Scotsman]

HELLDIVERS II - 10/10

Come and join us spread the glorious light of Freedom, Liberty and managed democracy across the universe.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Z2q7hpcpL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

The good fight continues!
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PRESENT: 2018 BMW S1000XR SE Sport.
PAST: 2009 Kawasaki ER-6F. 2021 Zontes ZT-125U.