Month: December 2016

2017 Gaming Resolutions

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions but this year circumstances are kind of guiding my hand. 2017 is going to suck for us. First our lease is up in July and we’re going to have to move since they want to renovate the apartment. They’ve been going through the entire complex doing this, dislodging some residents who’ve lived here for decades, so while I’m not taking it personally, it’s a major inconvenience. I’m old enough that moving means hiring someone. My days of humping heavy furniture up and down stairs are behind me, and Angela is in even worse shape for that kind of thing. So moving is going to be both a headache and a big expense. In fact we’re going to start packing up some stuff as soon as the Christmas decorations come down just in case we find a new place before July and have to move in a hurry.

Money is going to be tight this year because of that, and because our health insurance is going through the roof. Between the two of us we’re paying about $800/month on health insurance now. Mine is through work and went up about $40/month this year, Angela’s is through the ironically titled Affordable Care Act, and it jumped $125 or so from 2016 to 2017. So now we need to cut $165/month from other areas. We’re going to cancel cable and that will cover about $75/month of it, but the rest will have to come from cutting down on fun stuff, including games. Of course the big wildcard in all this is: how much will our new rent be? We’re looking at moving to a town outside the Raleigh area to see if we can save that way, but we can’t go so far out that we don’t get decent Internet since I need that for my work. It seems like rents go up just outside the city and then start going down as you move further out into more rural areas.

So enough depressing myself, here’re my fairly un-specific gaming resolutions for 2017:

Play games longer — I’ve already started doing this. For years I’ve been a real ‘grazer’ when it comes to games. I buy a ton of them and play most of them for a short time, basically until the novelty wore off or until some new shiny caught my eye. I very rarely finished games. I’ve been changing that habit in 2016 though. I’m not only finishing more games but in some cases continuing to play past the end of the narrative. I’ve found that many games seem to have 3 stages: The shiny new game phase where you’re learning the major systems and everything is fun. Then the ‘mid-game’ phase that can feel a little rote (and that’s where I previously would bail). Then finally the “Expert” phase where you’ve played enough that you start picking up on subtleties that you missed earlier, or maybe enjoying aspects that you’d kind of overlooked… I’m finding it hard to quantify this, but I know that I’m finding my interest in games seems to start high, then fall, then ramps back up the more I play.

Buy fewer games at launch — I need to resist the hype surrounding new games and buy far fewer at launch. Not only will this save me money since prices drop so quickly, but these days many games improve in the months after launch as the developers fix bugs, tweak performance or add features. Since I virtually never play games twice it just makes sense to wait for these improvements before purchasing and playing a game. I’ll still get a few titles at launch: stuff that is primarily multiplayer for instance, since you want to be competitive and play when the community is most active. Also a few select titles that just feel special to me: Horizon: Zero Dawn for instance.

Blog when I have something to say — This is a bit of a tangent, but I just recently re-opened this blog and already I’m feeling a little like I’m in a rut, mostly because I’ve been trying for daily posts even when I’m not really feeling it. So in 2017 I’m going to cut back and just do posts when I have something I want to share

And that’s about it. Here’s hoping 2017 sucks less than I expect it to. But I doubt it will.

No Man’s Thursday: Space Poop

Posted on by Nimgimli

Once again nerdy noodling cut into my gaming time last night. This time it was creating a bootable USB stick with a Linux distro on it. Seems like it should be easy but it turns out there’s a lot of trial and error involved. Depending on the computer, the thumbdrive type and the distro you’re trying to use, I guess. All I know is I’ve created 4 different supposedly bootable thumbdrives so far. I don’t think any one of them works on all the systems I’ve tried it on.

I did feel pretty good about finally getting a “Live” Ubuntu thumbdrive to boot and using the included disk partitioning software (GpartEd) to resize the linux partition on my dev server. When I set that system up a few years ago I was just playing around with linux so only devoted 100 GBs of space to it. (Did I really just say “only” 100 GBs?) Now that I have clones of 7 or 8 of our sites running on it, plus lots of backups, I was out of space. Didn’t really want to wipe the drive so I was happy this worked out.

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu with the Unity desktop on my old Lenovo laptop. I don’t really like Unity and I thought I could just install whatever desktop I wanted, but after Googling around I’m getting mixed signals. Some people say its fine to replace the desktop (I was looking at Mate) and others say you’re better off re-installing after finding a distro that has the desktop you want baked in.

So I’m considering Option C, which is to just install Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop instead of Ubuntu. I run Mint on my dev server and it feels pretty comfortable to me, but some things work slightly differently than they do on standard Ubuntu. Since all our websites run on Ubuntu I feel like it would behoove me to get more used to the Ubuntu way of doing things. So we’ll see.

Anyway on to gaming.

I might be almost done blogging about No Man’s Sky. I’m still enjoying the game a lot but I’m not sure how to talk about what I’m working on without it sounding boring and NMS is such a magnet for haters…I don’t want to give them any ammo to attack the game with.

I started off last night talking to my employees. The armorer says he’s done everything he can do for me, which is a little disappointing, but the others are keeping me busy.

I need to find something called Rigogen in order to make Copper Wiring, which in turn I need to make Circuit Boards, which is something my Construction Expert is waiting for. I Googled Rigogen and apparently it is found underwater. Since I started searching for it I’ve only found one planet with water and it was pretty shallow. No Rigogen there. Huge ‘bubbles’ of Emeril filled with water though. I almost drowned in one of them!

What’s a little annoying is that I stumbled upon a moon with ample deposits of copper (and gold) but I can’t use that copper to make copper wiring. Silly videogame logic.

I need to go in search of more Condensium for non-ferrous plating, also for circuit boards. I know where to get that, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I need Coryzagen to make glass with. Haven’t really started looking for that yet.

My farm is coming along. I have a few ‘crops’ growing and two more I’m working on. One requires Albumen Pearls which are always fun to collect because whenever you take one, the local sentinels freak right out. Probably because these pearls are actually some kind of chrysalis for some kind of life form.

But what I spent a lot of time on last night was gathering Coprite. You get that from “overfed animals.” Yeah it’s space poop more or less. Pre-Foundation Update feeding an animal just resulted in it digging up small deposits of random materials. It was hardly worth it once the novelty of having a short-term animal friend wore off. But now if you feed them they make Coprite, which I basically needed as fertilizer for some crop the farmer wants. The other material I need for this crop comes from carcasses. Since I’m not a MONSTER I wasn’t about to start shooting the animals I’d just been feeding so I decided I’d collect this stuff from aggro animals.

I finished the night on a moon that had both aggressive sentinels and aggressive animals; I was attacked as soon as I jumped out of my ship. So next time I play I should finish gathering all that up.

Other than that it was business as usual. Learning new words, fighting pirates, scavenging. I found a derelict ship but since it only had one more ‘slot’ than my current ship I decided to skip it.

See? It all sounds really boring, but actually my gaming time flew by and I was sad when it was time to quit for the night. I do think one night a week is a nice frequency for NMS though; it feels fresh and fun every time I log in (and it gives Hello Games time to get the next update out before I leave the game behind).

Return to Mantis Burn

Posted on by Nimgimli

The plan for last night had been to jump back into Shadow of Mordor but as so frequently happens with me, I got distracted somewhere along the way.

Distraction one: I got a wild hair and decided to re-purpose an old Lenovo laptop I had kicking around. It was set-up to dual boot a Preview Build of Windows 10 (long expired) or a pretty ancient build of Linux Mint. I thought maybe I’d give straight up Ubuntu a try and burned what was supposed to be a bootable USB stick to install from. Did that on a Windows 10 machine, but couldn’t get it to work. After noodling around I decided to try the same thing from the old Mint installation and that worked, but with all the reboots and Bios checks and research it took up a lot of my night.

Now I have a vanilla Ubuntu laptop (I wiped the partitions to it’s just a single boot machine) and gawd do I hate the default Ubuntu desktop. So I started looking into alternatives and that ate up more time.

When I finally got around to gaming I found myself booting up Mantis Burn Racing. Every so often I go to psnprofiles.com and look at the Trophy Advisor. This little gizmo suggests the next trophy you should work on, from all your games, based on how many players of that game have earned that trophy (I think). What always comes up for me, if I filter by just PS4 games, is the “Forwards is so overrated” Trophy for MBR. 92.22% of MBR owners have earned that one. I figured I’d better get it too.

Mantis Burn Racing is an over-head racing game with nice CaRPG over-tones. As you win races in career mode you earn experience that unlocks new cars and new car upgrades. Each car has a few slots for upgrades and if you fill all the slots you can spend (in-game) cash to “Level Up” the car which unlocks more slots.

This kind of system keeps racing games fun for me. In a pure racing game where you’re just racing over and over to shave seconds off a clock, I kind of get bored, but earning phat lewt I can use to level up with? That’s right in my wheelhouse.

I bought MBR when I got the PS4 Pro since it was one of the first games to offer native 4K gameplay (granted it’s not a super complex game) and even though I enjoyed it, I was quickly lured away by the spectacle what was the PS4 Pro upgrades for the Infamous games. I always meant to get back to MBR because it’s a fun little game (I think it was $15 or $20 at launch). I’m glad I finally took the time to revisit it. Oh, and they’ve added an HDR patch since I last played it, too!

Barely Fairy Fencer Tuesday

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday was chaotic. I was back at work, the dog was back at the vet, and my new video card and monitor arrived. In case you missed my rant, in the midst of a computer meltdown last week one of my monitors crapped out and needed to be replaced. The new video card was because I was having all kinds of mechanical issues with the old one. I’d had to replace my power supply a month or so ago and the cables of the new one were so stiff that when I plugged the auxiliary power into my old video card, I couldn’t put the case cover back on without it pressing on the cables. When the case pressed on the cables the PC would report that the power wasn’t attached.

Rather than address the issue I ran with no cover on the PC. LOL! Finally I decided I was sick of having a PC that sounded like a vacuum cleaner whenever I ran a game (which I rarely do these days, on PC) so I decided to get a cheap replacement. I settled on an Nvidia TI 1050. It has one fan and requires no auxiliary power, AND it was only $130 or so. It popped in as easy as you please and I finally have the case back on my rig. The only concern I have is that it has one DVI port and one HDMI port. Fortunately my old, still working monitor is DVI and the new one I got is HDMI so I’m good for now but if I ever have to replace that old monitor I’ll have to get some kind of DVI-HDMI adapter cable, or find a monitor that still has a DVI port.

What I didn’t anticipate was that the new monitor would be so desperately in need of calibration when it arrived. I’m not good a calibrating displays. I can see that the image is wrong but my brain just isn’t good at knowing what needs to change to fix it. I tried a few calibration websites and they tell me what to adjust. Problem is they tell you WHAT to adjust, but not which way to adjust it, and I’m not very patient. Do I need more or less contrast? More or less saturation? It’s bad enough with a TV when you’re sitting with a remote in your hand, but with this (and I think most) monitors there’re 4 buttons that map to up, down, exit and enter/menu. The monitor is so light you can’t just press these buttons, you have to hold the monitor with one hand and press them with the other and it’s just so awkward.

In the end, I hit up Google and found someone who had shared their calibration settings for this monitor model (nothing fancy, a 1080P ASUS VS248H, also about $130). I did the same thing with the new TV a few months back and thankfully this technique (if you can call copying numbers a technique) works pretty well for a filthy display casual like me. I know that a display should be calibrated based on that specific piece of hardware (experts will tell you no two displays are exactly alike) and the room it is in but I guess I’m just not that fussy. I have nothing but admiration for people who calibrate displays professionally. It seems likes it’s a real art form, getting things just right.

So knock on wood, my computer is back up and running and now it’s just a matter of re-installing the tools I haven’t gotten to yet.

Once all that was done, I finally sat down for Fairy Fencer F Tuesday. (Angela tells me I should really move Fairy Fencer to Friday for the sake of more alliteration.) Not too much to report, it was mostly a grinding night. My last session I’d added some new characters so I wanted to sort them out and see what they were capable of, and I spent way too long figuring out how an “Item Sonar” ability worked.

The story did take a dark turn when Fang met a girl named Emily. He saved her from some thugs and they got talking and had a nice meal together and then she starts to tell him her story and…well you wouldn’t want me to spoil things, would you? But in a game that has so far been silly and light-hearted, this was a sobering moment. We also learned a little bit about Eryn and why she has no memories, and had our first in what I suspect will be a series of encounters with a new villain.

One thing I find I’m missing in Fairy Fencer F is gear. Each character has a pre-set Fury, which is their weapon for the entire game (at least as far as I’ve gotten). Then they have 1 armor slot and 1 accessory slot and that’s it in terms of gear that impacts stats (they also have appearance items). I kind of like collecting gear in RPGs so I miss that a bit.

But last night battles started getting to where I needed to think a little bit more about what kinds of attacks to use. Each character’s Fury can act as several types of weapon. For instance Harley’s can be a gun, a sword or … that third thing I can’t recall. I’ve been treating her as a gun user but last night I started encountering enemies weak against sword attacks so I had to re-configure her a bit to use more sword skills, and that helped her be much more powerful in these battles.

For years I’ve enjoyed starting games more than finishing them because I love learning new game systems and I felt like once I was past the first 5-10 hours I’d encountered everything. But I think for years I haven’t been paying attention because lately I’ve been trying to stick with games longer and what I find is many games continue to layer on complexity that isn’t immediately obvious, like this weapon thing in FFF.

In some ways I feel like I’m enjoying games on a whole new level these days, between finally noticing these nuances, and playing past The End to chase Trophies and stuff. That in turn makes me feel good because I feel like I’m getting more enjoyment and value out of each game. Considering how tight money is these days, that’s a really good thing!

When did Shadow of Mordor get easy?

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple of sales back I picked up Shadow of Mordor, Game of the Year Edition for the PS4. That was actually the THIRD time I’ve bought the game. I bought it when it came out on the PS4, then bought the GotY edition for Xbox One for $10, and now the GotY edition for PS4. I forget how much it was on PS4 but it was cheaper to buy the GotY edition than it was to buy the DLC that came with it.

Three purchases and I’ve never really played the game. I mean I tried it when it first launched but it was HARD for me. I have nothing but frustrating memories of dying over and over again. I may have got through one story mission before moving on.

My most recent purchase was spurred by news that the developers were supporting PS4 Pro, and last night I finally fired it up, bracing myself to be humbled.

And I found the opening hour or so to be pretty easy, and I don’t know why. Now I am NOT complaining. I want to play through this game, not get stymied by the first Orc Captain I encounter. I’m just curious about why I’m finding it so much easier now. I’m pretty sure my gaming skills haven’t improved any. I’m old and any kind of hand-eye coordination activity is on a downward slide now.

Now maybe I’m just remembering wrong and I got farther along before getting tripped up. Fact is I haven’t done the first story quest in this new play-through, but I have killed 3 orc Captains that I just stumbled upon. Or maybe the game was patched to tone down the difficulty (there’s no difficulty setting).

But I was also wondering if it has to do with the new TV and/or the PS4 Pro performance improvements. I have no idea what the imput lag on my old TV was but it was probably big given how old the set was. It was from when 1080P LCD flat screens were pretty new. The new TV (Samsung KS8000) is supposed to have input lag of about 21ms in game mode, which is pretty low. I KNOW I have fewer motion sickness issues since I got the new TV…been meaning to write a post about that. I’m not sure that the PS4 Pro improves performance that much given that I’m playing in “High Resolution” mode but it might smooth out dropped/slow frame pacing issues.

I actually Googled the game and came up with complaints both about the game being too easy and it being too hard, so I’m not even sure what others thought about it. I guess all I can do is keep playing and see how much harder it gets.

I really hope I can enjoy the game more this time around. I certainly was having a good time last night. I was slicing and dicing my way through orcs as if my last name was “Son of Arathorn!”

Holiday Weekend Recap: Killing isn’t very Christmas-y

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another Christmas has come and gone. This time of the year always feels a little melancholy to me, not so much because of the holiday itself, but because of the calendar. I love that chunk of the year between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve, and I hate January-May. That’s just the dead-zone part of the year with the only notable event being paying taxes. Blech. So when Christmas arrives it always reminds me that we’re about to enter the dark months.

Christmas also makes me remember being a kid and having parents and grandparents and a live Christmas tree surrounded by lots of presents and very little responsibility (at least for me, I’m sure my parents didn’t feel nearly as carefree when they looked at that tree). Kids don’t know how good they have it!

My way of keeping Christmas is pretty simple: I read A Christmas Carol to try to remember the spirit of Christmas. I’m not at all religious so the holiday, to me, has nothing to do with Christ. But it has to do with a time of year when people used to be generous, forgiving and kind to each other. If fear of some higher-power was what caused them to be like that, then fine. I never cared WHY it was like that, I just appreciated that it was.

Then I watch A Christmas Story because it reminds me of the few Christmases I got to enjoy with my father, who I remember being as gruff and blustery as the Old Man in the movie. Now mind you I wasn’t a kid in the 40s (when the movie takes place), I’m not THAT old, but the 40s are closer to the 60s than the 60s are to today, and I was a kid in the 60s.

Anyway, on to the recap, such that it is. I didn’t really play too much. It just feels a little weird playing a game where you’re trying to stealth kill 25 dudes with a combat knife (one of the Tomb Raider trophies I’ve been trying for) on Christmas. 🙂 I did download and enjoy demos of both Gravity Rush 2 and NieR: Automata, both on PS4.

NieR in particular surprised me. It’s basically a hack & slasher where you’re fighting robots, but it goes from a 3D game to a 2d side-scroller to and overhead brawler and back again, constantly changing, but doing so seamlessly so you kind of run in and out of dimensions as you play. I was really enjoying myself until I got to a boss battle; the combat up to then felt fluid and impactful and very satisfying. Then the boss battle just kind of frustrated me, as boss battles are designed to do. I tell you what, if the demo had stopped before that boss battle I probably would’ve pre-ordered it, so I’m glad it didn’t.

I also bought a bundle of a bunch of Telltale Walking Dead games and 7 Days to Die. Thanks to the holiday sale the bundle was $12 or $13. I started Episode 1 of The Walking Dead, which I’ve done many times on many systems. I made it farther than I usually do but adventure games just piss me off. In this one I got to a point where I needed to get past a locked door to get some medicine for a character who is dying. So, y’know, it’s kind of urgent. The only way to get through this door is to find a key. “Sorry dying dude, yes I could kick this door open but y’know, that wouldn’t be proper. Keep dying while I find the key.” So dumb.

I finally googled how to get the key after I’d spent 10 minutes growing more and more frustrated and irritated looking around and around the environment. Turns out there’s like 5 steps you have to do to get the key and they involve leaving the building (and the dying dude) to go rescue someone else and then running hither and yon and finally you get the key far from where the door is.

I don’t know how you’d figure out this puzzle. No, correction. The way to “solve” this puzzle is to suspend your sense of reason and logic. You accept that this is a video game and the dying guy will not actually die, so you just ignore him and forge on with what the game wants you to do, because this isn’t real, it’s a game. You need to apply game logic because you’re playing a game and games are inherently stupid.

And that was the end of my time with The Walking Dead. I hate when a game forces you to act like a gamer instead of letting you kind of exist inside the fiction of the game world. I don’t want to be constantly reminded that this isn’t real, it’s a video game. I don’t know why, as an artist, you’d create a game that screams “It’s just a stupid game” at the player.

My friend Tipa says she doesn’t play single player games anymore because (I’m paraphrasing and hopefully won’t twist her words too much) the only point of them is to press the buttons that the developer wants you to press when they want you to press them. I never really got that until right now. Don’t think about solving the puzzle. Think about what the game designer wants you to do.

Anyway enough hating on The Walking Dead since I know a ton of people love it. I actually was enjoying the dialog stuff and had it been basically a ‘choose your own adventure’ non-game I probably would’ve enjoyed it. Like Firewatch, for example.

Anyway, other than the above I keep on picking away at Rise of the Tomb Raider trophies. I got the 100% trophy finally (finish the story, do all the sidequests and challenges, find all the collectibles) and now I’m working on odd stuff like the Bacon trophy (kill a boar with a molotov cocktail) and cheerful holiday tasks like taking out 5 enemies with one poison gas arrow. 🙂

I think today I may go back to Far Cry Primal. Or maybe give FF XV another try. We’ll see.

My tech nightmare

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week I offended some ancient technology demi-god somehow, and I paid the price.

It all started Wednesday when folks were talking about LOTRO. I was wondering if my old characters still existed so I fired up Steam and installed the game. When it finished installing through Steam I fired it up and it did that thing where every damned Steam game seems to need to install C++ libraries and assorted other things. In this case ANCIENT versions. Then it had to patch. Then I let it download high-resolution textures.

When it was finally done I started the game, with the intention of literally taking a screen shot of my characters to share on Imzy. I had no intention of actually playing the game. LOTRO started, my primary monitor when black. Stayed black. I could hear sounds but they were broken and stuttering. So I jumped over to monitor #2 and right clicked LOTRO and picked Close Window and nothing happened. So I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and nothing happened. Task manager wouldn’t come up. Vexed, I held down the power button on the machine to kill it. And that’s when trouble really began.

When I restarted the machine it blue-screened with an error of BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO. Someone suggested this could be a video card issue, so I dragged the system out and swapped it with an old card I had. No help there. Swapped it back and started googling solutions. Tried various things for the next day or so. Some of them, like an extended chkdsk, took hours and hours to run. Tried to restore but Windows said it couldn’t find any restore points.

Finally found this solution online and it got me back to the desktop. Basically you’re replacing a bunch of files in C:\Windows\System32\config with backup copies.

So now I was at my desktop but my Start menu wouldn’t come up and everything felt really slow and sluggish. Virus maybe? Ran a bunch of checkers but found nothing. That was another few hours gone. Ever since installing LOTRO when the system starts up, about 20-30 seconds after I see a desktop, one of my monitors goes black for a few seconds. I see a ‘loading cursor’ and then the desktop appears, but with limited functionality (no Start menu, can’t open more than 1 file explorer window from the task bar, and some other stuff). I kind of feel like whatever this is, it’s undoing my fixes.

But at least I could get to my files. First thing I did was check to make sure my backups were up to date and…my backup system had quietly stopped working last June! Nothing since then was backed up. OK well I decided to back stuff up manually. Starting copying stuff to an external USB drive and it was going at like 18 Kbs and was going to take two days to copy, then it crapped out completely. USB was apparently out, but I could still copy across my home network to my Linux server. But first I had to clear out a bunch of stuff from that to make room.

I had to blow away a bunch of dev sites but freed up the space and starting copying my files to the Linux server. That was going to take a couple hours. 25% of the way through, I get an error that the PC can’t talk to Linux any more. I look at the Linux box and it was frozen. It has never done this, and had been running flawlessly for months. NOW it decides to crap out. So I reboot THAT and when I get it back online, the PC can no longer see it.

Interspersed with all of this I’m trying a bunch of things to repair the Windows installation but nothing is working. OK time to Reset the machine. By this time it’s about 4 pm Thursday. I start the reset process. It gets about 40% done and reboots to a black screen with a circle of dots indicating some process is happening. I let it sit like that for 7 hours. At about 11:30 I manually restart the machine and I get a “Loading Windows…” screen. Yay! I go to bed. In the morning I find that same black screen with the circle of dots. I reboot again and I get “Restoring files” and when that finishes I’m right back to where I started. The Reset failed.

At some point you start trying crazy shit. I read somewhere to unplug all USB devices. I do that and try the Reset again and it fails again. And for some reason when I re-attached the external USB drive I plug it into another USB port and… it works perfectly. So apparently one of my USB ports is blown. At least that means I can backup my files, so I do that. Now the pressure is off.

I try to reset or restore the system through a bunch of different techniques and none of them work. Half-way through this process, my main monitor stops working. Now to be fair this monitor has been a little wonky for a while. It would get stuck in standby mode and I’d have to cut the power to reset it. Now it’s frozen and won’t come back, but the thing is, it APPEARS to be working. So now I start to wonder how many times in the past days I’ve thought Windows was frozen but it’s just the monitor freezing. Anyway I crawl under the desk and disconnect that, and switch the backup monitor to the port that main monitor was using just to be sure it isn’t the video card connection.

So count so far: 1 fubar’d Windows OS, 1 fubar’d USB port, 1 fubar’d Linux service, 1 fubar’d monitor. All in the course of 3 days. AND my laptop has been acting up; the cursor keeps going nuts. Oh well.

Finally I just give in and install Windows from scratch. This works but I see a lot more partitions than I expect to see. There are 2 System Restore partitions, one that’s a few hundred megs, the other and about 3 GB. Then there’s another UEFI partition, if I recall correctly. Not being as up on Windows as I should be, I leave them all be. I hope I don’t regret that.

So now I’m re-installing apps and I’ve confirmed that my backup is actually running again. I ordered a new cheap monitor (money is tight right now or I would’ve just gone and bought a new system…this one is 6 years old) and a new video card because my Spidey Sense is telling me that my current card might have had something to do with this issue (sometimes when I start this machine it reports that the card’s supplementary power cable isn’t attached…in fact I replaced the power supply because of this not too long ago).

Hopefully it won’t take me too long to get everything back where it was. I’m going to have to re-create those dev sites on the Linux server, and I need to get all my tools re-installed on the PC and pull down all my work repos. And then the next thing I am not ever going to do is reinstall LOTRO! In fact I don’t think I’ll mess with installing games on the system again. I don’t play PC games and I just don’t need these kinds of headaches. Maybe games from the Windows Store since they are sandboxed and can’t bork your whole system.

Now I’m going to go give my game consoles a big ‘ol hug!

No Man’s Thursday: Keeping the troops happy

Posted on by Nimgimli

It has been a crappy week here at Dragonchasers HQ. One of those weeks where every piece of tech you touch decides to go belly up. My main PC is down, my laptop is acting weird and my Linux box suddenly started crashing. Ergo no blog posts for the last few days.

By yesterday evening I decided it was time to step away from it all and enjoy No Man’s Sky since I skipped No Man’s Thursday last week. Of course the first order of business was remembering what I was in the middle of. Now that I have a base and some employees that’s easier than it used to be. I just ask them what it was they wanted.

You could certainly call these tasks fetch quests but in a game as open as NMS I actually appreciate having some specific things I need to do. Each of my employees needs a different exotic element, and none of them was available in my home system. So off I went in search of.

I wound up in a system that had been discovered by someone else back in August but ~gasp~ that person had discovered the system but not the planets inside it. Must’ve been one of those people determined to ‘finish’ NMS as soon as possible. His or her loss, I’ll be happy to collect the credits from discovering these planets and better yet one of them was a snow biome (I named it Christmas Village) that had the Coryzagen my armorer needed to cure a disease he’d contracted.

Of course before I went to collect that I had to save a Freighter that was under attack, then docked and drank rum with the captain and got some flush rewards (well ok, pretty minor rewards). I don’t know why these pirates keep picking fights with me. I guess they can’t see the 100 hash marks on the side of my ship until it is too late.

Christmas Village was a lovely little planet and gathering up the Coryzagen was a pleasant enough task. Next I needed Candensium and that, I’d been told, I could find on radiated planets. Luckily enough there was one of those in this same system and I’d already crafted the Haz-Mat Gloves I’d need to collect it. Still this was a tough challenge as my exo-suit was not set up well to fend off radiation. I had to recharge pretty frequently, and then a radiation storm hit and things just got ridiculous. I nearly died. I can’t recall the last time I died in No Man’s Sky, but it’s been a while. In the end I got back to my ship and hung out until the storm blew itself out. Then I quickly gathered the materials I needed and hit the skies again.

There were a few more planets to visit in this system; I couldn’t just leave any undiscovered. A few more space battles, a few gathering excursions and it was getting late. I zipped off to the system’s space station and teleported back home. I LOVE teleporting home since the galactic map is so damned confusing. Knowing I can just jump back to base from any space station means I can just roam around star systems without worrying about getting lost.

The end result of my trouble was a new ship weapon blueprint, and I learned to make non-ferrous plates which I need for circuit boards. Circuit boards I need in order to make automated mining systems. Of course getting the blueprints is one thing; now I have to gather materials again. That’ll be next week’s goal.

Firewatch, start to finish

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I mentioned needing a gaming palette cleanser to put between two somewhat similar open world games. I found it in Firewatch.

I’m probably the last person to play this game, which is available on Steam & GoG for Mac, Windows and Linux, as well as on PS4 and Xbox One. I’d heard lots of great things about it which made me skeptical because I’m just inherently contrary like that.

Turns out I was wrong. It was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s a game… I guess it’s what some folks call a walking simulator. It’s more like a story that you have to turn a crank to hear. And by turn a crank, I mean walk around in this world. Since the whole game is the story I don’t want to say too much about it, other than I really was interested to see how things turned out.

It was a perfect palette cleanser because yesterday was cold and rainy and I wrapped myself up in a blanket on the couch and played through the entire thing, with just a break for Lola walking and to have dinner. I didn’t time myself but howlongtobeat.com says it’s a 4 hour game and that feels about right to me.

Now the bad news. I played it on the PS4 Pro (where it runs at 4K) and performance wasn’t great. There was a lot of draw in, frequent stutters and some items you interact with could be needlessly fiddly. Y’know the drill, you’re moving around to get the little “Activate” prompt to pop up. None of these were crucial problems because there’s nothing that requires reflexes or anything, but it just took away from the aesthetics of the experience a little bit. I wish they’d given us an option to run at 1080P with a smoother performance.

Still, really glad I played it. Wasn’t completely happy with the ending but hey, some stories don’t turn out the way you expect them to or want them to. I think the biggest praise I can give the game is I wish I could learn more about what happened with these characters after the story ends.

One note about price, I paid $10 for this on sale, I think it’s normally $15, so about the same as buying a new movie digitally. I would welcome more short, narrative driven experiences for around this price. If Firewatch had been 20 hours I would’ve gotten so bored with it; the 4-5 hours it took me to play through it felt perfect. Now I’ll put it on the shelf and maybe take it out and replay it in a few years in the same way you pull out an old movie for a re-watch. Seems like an awesome niche to me.

Weekend Recap: Lots of frittering, little progress

Posted on by Nimgimli

I didn’t accomplish much at all this past weekend. Part of the reason is that Lola was sick and we went on LOTS of walks so she could frequently answer the call of nature. Every time I sat down to do something she’d be there, sitting in front of me and beaming “NEED TO GO” thoughts into my brain.

But even the gaming time I did carve out wasn’t too productive. I mentioned that I finished the storyline for Rise of the Tomb Raider last week, and whenever I finish a game like this I enter a period where I feel a little adrift, grasping around to find the next game that is really going to click with me.

So I spent time checking out the holiday and limited time stuff I wrote about last week. That was mostly disappointing to me. The multiplayer mode of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare still makes me anxious. I wrote about Elder Scrolls Online’s New Life festival on Friday. I haven’t felt any desire to go back and do more of that, and in fact it has somehow turned me off TESO completely (temporarily, I’m sure). I installed DC Universe Online but you have to be level 10 to partake in that game’s winter holiday event and I was level 7. I started leveling up but the game is just so janky on consoles…I couldn’t deal with it. I played Trove a few times and that felt like enough. It just starts feeling really repetitive really fast; I’m assuming it gets more interesting if you stick with it so don’t take this as a bad judgement of the game. I’m just not ready to put in the time to get to the good stuff.

I fired up Destiny but I might be done with Destiny. I think I have a whole post about that so I’ll save it.

In the end I spent a lot of time back in Tomb Raider trying to 100% the game (which is way different than 100%ing the trophies). I’m up to 92 or 93% now. I think I was around 70% when I finished the story. In this context 100% means you’ve found all the collectibles, done all the side missions and challenges, solved all the tombs and stuff. I have all the big stuff done, now I’m mostly hunting collectibles and finishing up challenges (challenges are tasks like “Cut down 5 Soviet flags” and usually the trick is finding the objectives since they don’t show up on the mini-map).

I also started Far Cry Primal, which a friend of mine is really enjoying. This is a game I snagged for cheap during a Black Friday sale — one of those “I’ll get this now and play it during a gaming drought” — titles. (Do we really still have gaming droughts?) Anyway I was really enjoying the bow combat in Rise of the Tomb Raider and there’s a lot of bow combat in Primal too, so I downloaded it. I think I’m really going to like it some day, but for now maybe going from one “open world semi-stealth bow-combat wilderness adventure” game to another is too much of a good thing. I might need to find a palette cleanser between Tomb Raid and FC Primal. I’ll give it one more shot before a back burner it though.

So here it is Monday, and I have the day off, and I still don’t know what to play! #FirstWorldProblems Maybe I should watch movies all day or something.