Year: 2020

It’s gone warm again here !

And by warm, we Brits usually mean that we’re having to not wear very much (behind closed doors) in order to survive being way too hot. (It’s only peaking at about 25 degrees C but our houses are designed to keep in heat for winter).

It’s actually probably time to stop the computer doing sums … I’d turned off the Rosetta work already because they’ve kept their daftly short deadlines and there are hardly any Covid related work units coming through now. If the houses are designed to trap heat, it’s not a great idea to add heat in …

Leafing through some of the older pictures posted here has prompted me for the latest project … the Currently Unnamed Dwagon Rock Band. I dunno, this was another daft idea that’s taken root and it has to happen now.

The first character to be drawn is partly inspired by that and the idea as a whole gets some inspiration from :

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s a free hand drawn egg circle for the centre drum there. It definitely seems easier to draw the lines and circles by hand than it is by non-cheaty ways on the graphics tablet. I’ll go back to the graphics tablet at some point, probably to finish the job with the Band. That fella isn’t quite finished either, forgot to colour the nose.

That’s another of the old pictures … Band’s gonna have a couple of guitarists in there.

Gaming has seen me go back to an old one …

Those are the crude (but highly functional) graphics of Creeper World 3, Arc Eternal. It’s the tower defence game I mentioned on Tuesday and for this mission, you have two bases split on either side of the map and enemies in the middle. Creeper spews out of the dot thingys (top and bottom middle, plus there’s a couple left and right middle) and the deeper blue it is, the more layers there are of it. Your towers can shoot it, you can have bombers bomb it and the turquoise around the top is your own anti-creeper.

Tower defense games tend to be either attritional crawls across the map where you gradually gain ground in the face of the unstoppable enemy or a race where you’re trying to keep your towers ahead of ever increasingly strong enemies. It’s a great concept when it works well. I’ve been tempted to go back into Defense Grid, which did work extremely well … but not Defense Grid 2 which changed some of the mechanics and I don’t think it was as good.

I’ve been doing the internet spaceships thing again … This is a balance again because overdoing it can be really bad for my wrists. I’m actually going to have to change how I fly I think, because I’m yawing a lot (turn left/right instead of banking or climbing) and I think the twisting of my flightstick is aggravating the wrist.

A new ship has appeared in the fleet …

She’s Grabnarr, named after the cheeky, chuckly, lovely Tashnarr who is streaming doing jigsaws at the moment … (twitch link)

Grabnarr is fitted for mining work, in particular the high value Low Temperature Diamonds which are commonplace at the location above … the rings of Borann A planet 2.

She’s a Krait Mk II, very similar to the Searching For Potatoes which saw me do my last major bit of exploration. The engines are different but you still have a great view from the pilot’s seat.

It can be a tight fit in there …

Peaceful though (when the pirates are distracted away !)

Hard at work – this was just after mining out the asteroid so the purple lasers aren’t on. The occasional bright spots are collector limpets going off to fetch the bits mined off the asteroid.

Sale time ! Best deal available at the time. The plan is to operate Grabnarr until I mine the 500 tonnes required to open up one of the engineers and then Grabnarr will be retired. That’s probably 2 sessions of Low Temperature Diamonds and then it’s the slightly lower value Painite (350k/tonne) because the engineer wants 10 tonnes of that.

Almost the end of the tale …

Going to the Dark Side as I call it led to another milestone … Trading Elite ! I didn’t have any elite ratings in my previous 2 characters …

Double Elite ! Combat Elite will take a fair bit longer. Might do it this year ? Expert is the middle of the 9 ranks, with Master, Dangerous, Deadly and Elite to go. A lot of that will be done in the Admiral Luperza :

Got more exploring to do first though.

Oh ! Excession was good, currently enjoying Thrawn by Timothy Zahn.

Seeya ! Stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone,

I’ve been descending into those games again … And also dreaming of munchies.

That one happened as a quick sketch over the weekend, triggered by posts from the lovely actress and donut fan Rekha Sharma. I’ve been enjoying seeing what she posts on the Twitter (Linky) and it’s always something nice, lovely and making people smile. Another sketch happened too but that was for my Comic Con friend. She liked it, which makes it worth it.

There’s been a couple of those, sketches that I only share with the people for whom they’re intended. In a time where there is the internet and whatever goes on the internet stays there (even in the archive sites), it’s worth being a little circumspect with what you post. And how you edit …

I don’t edit my posts much at all. It’s actually pretty rare. Like if I spot a typo in a post that’s months old, I won’t fix that. The kinds of edits I do tend to be formatting, sometimes blogger pops in a heap of extra line spaces, especially around pictures. I’ll chop those out because it helps the flow of the post if there aren’t all that many white spaces in there. But I’ll only very rarely change what’s in a post. It’s a reflection of how and what I’m thinking at the time, so if you change the writing then you change the memory. That said, that PC bits post of the other day saw a change happen … I don’t like giving advice that’s wrong and I needed to add in a “Don’t get that, get this !” in there …

Talking of shopping … I’m mostly ignoring what’s going on in the world at the moment and essentially staying in my bunker as much as I can waiting for it to blow over. That’s probably the best way for everyone at the moment, although hopefully we’re coming to the end of that now. I’m quite looking forwards to getting out and about around the shops again, although it’ll be odd being out there again.

I’ll probably need to acquire a mask so I don’t get lynched for sneezing a lot.

I’ve been thinking about breaking the steering away from ordering stuff online too … Let’s see :

Music – I’m always wanting more and after seeing the first two episodes of Devs, I want the album by Low which has the theme tune. It’s a great theme tune : Congregation by Low (youtube link). And there’s more too, like expanding the Mike Oldfield collection, Dirty Vegas, Lisa Miskovsky and a couple of others like Agnes Obel.
Lego – it’s calling again …
Graphics card – I’ll come on to more about this later but I’m now definitely looking to upgrade, sadly though the options are limited to the 2060 cards costing £300. That’s more than I want to spend. Newer cards haven’t come out for ages and it’s the new cards coming out that pushes down the prices.
Books – always room for more books in the book cave.

Game ! This one is the latest. It’s The Outer Worlds and I started it off after completing Deus Ex Mankind Divided last week. It’s another first person perspective role playing game and because it came out just last year … is pretty demanding on the hardware. I have it on the medium settings at the moment, which pushes my graphics card pretty hard.

Sure does look pretty though and I’ve been getting to grips with the gameplay so far.

Parvati’s a good egg too, probably very heavily inspired by Kaylee from Firefly though …

Other things in the gaming pot lately have been Motorsport Manager, where I’ll go for the No Sponsors achievement in the next season. The team should have more than enough funding to allow that.

There’s also been a re-entrance of the Nomnivorian Swarm in Stellaris, first time I’ve properly been back in there for a little while. Stellaris is becoming a bit of a sad case. There have been two major version updates lately … but the quality assurance isn’t there in the game any more I think. Instead of releases being held until the game is as bug free as they can manage, new bugs are introduced and old bugs are not removed. I closed today’s session slightly early because my fleets hit the pacifism bug again (they get engaged in combat and don’t shoot back unless you save and reload). I saw another new bug with the fleet manager on the weekend, plus there’s another new one with the planet display where it doesn’t show all of the pops on the planet.

It’s annoying … and there are a bunch of other games to be looking at. Besides, Stellaris has been guilty of doing nasty things to my shoulder and neck (I lean forward and look up – bad habit). I had a little peek at the Elite Fleet Carriers again :

That’s the Sleepy Tea Vault, which was over on the beta server for a bit. It’ll be a long time before I get a carrier on the live server, if at all. The user interface for controlling them is a bit ropey and I’m not convinced they have a viable purpose in the game. I did enjoy getting back in for some trading on Sunday though and I’ll try my hand at mining at some point relatively soon.

I had another look at Creeper World 3, Arc Eternal today as well. It’s a tower defense game, which is summed up by you having to fend off a series of waves of enemies by building gun and other types of towers and arranging a maze to get the most out of your defenses. Instead of having bugs or other enemies, Creeper World 3 has a fluid like enemy that gradually spreads over the map. It’s a nice variation and somewhat more hands off than other strategy games. I think I’ll stick with this one more.

The Outer Worlds is very pretty though.

There’s some lovely rich colours in there, plus it’s nice to see the stuff on the distance that you can actually travel in to. (Deus Ex Mankind Divided had great backdrops that you couldn’t visit).

Oh ! I’m off work this week. It was originally scheduled to be Comic Con and Lords IST20 week. Those aren’t happening this year. I needed the time off anyway, I tend to burn out these days and need to watch the signs so that it doesn’t creep up on me too much. I’m planning to have a fairly easy week, although I need to moderate the game playing somewhat in order to avoid having my hands flare up. Currently got soreness in my right hand, probably due to internet spaceships …

Oh well.

They do look pretty though. Might have to look into jumping on a deal for a better flightstick too soon … The drawing does somewhat affect my hands as well. Putting pressure on the pad can aggravate the soreness, I think I need to look into using the graphics tablet again.

Oh – after a while away from doing them, I think I’ll be doing another music post soon. It nearly happened tonight but I have more sketchy ideas … and I think these sketchy ideas would be perfect for a music post. It may involve dwagons and a band. Let’s see how it does.

In the meantime, stay safe, be well !

Hello everyone,

Two things tonight ! First up :

Finished Deus Ex Mankind Divided …

Got the Pacifist approach achievement. Yep, shooty shooty game that’s possible to be played through without murdering anyone. Sure, limbs may have been broken and people put in hospital with severe concussions but … they’ll live right ?

Including that guy. You know, that one. The one I can’t talk about cos of spoilers and all that.

After a shaky start, where I was finding the cover movement system to be a bit clunky, something eventually clicked and I really enjoyed playing through this one. It still has its bugs, including crash to desktop and I had one tonight which was a hang up when reloading (You reload a lot the way I was playing …) But the bugs aren’t particularly game breaking and the game comes back up again on a reload. I didn’t lose my save at all …

I’ll be back playing this one again sometime. But not yet because I picked up The Outer Worlds in the latest Epic Games sale and that’s supposed to be amazing. I’ll play the original again too. There’s potential for further games in the series but something strange happened in the games industry around the time this came out and outside of things like Assassins Creed, the studios got very wary about continuing current IPs. Bit like how the Mass Effect series ended with Andromeda.

Hopefully there’s more to come from the Adam Jensen Deus Ex storyline. There’s definitely more potential there, especially with threads started in the emails and articles scattered through the game and that Whopper in the credits.

Gotta do the Golden Penguin mission too, I completely missed that this time.

What else tonight ? I’ve seen a few things about PC upgrades again and doing it on the cheap … So what would I get if it were around 20 years ago again and I was on a super strict budget ?

Before I dive in – disclosure note : I’ve never been offered any inducements by any hardware companies.

These all start with the core again and that’d be :
AMD Ryzen 3 3200G Quad core chip with graphics – £92. I’m not convinced the graphics here would allow for games like Deus Ex or other really pretty games but you can add a proper graphics card later. Point is, it saves £150-£200 as a get you going thing.
This goes in a MSI B450 motherboard for £99. This drops £75 on the board that I have. It’s not the newest or shiniest but should still be a good foundation.
(A small and important edit – if you’re looking at this post like a shopping list, DO NOT BUY YET. AMD are coming out with a B550 chipset which will go into better motherboards for about the same price.)
Memory spec calls for DDR4-2933. We’ll actually go up to DDR4-3200 here. It’s a bit faster and a bit cheaper. The system would clock it back to 2933 if it has to. Cost for 16GB – £91.

The common theme is that we’re accepting these compromises in order to get a more affordable machine. It’s a lower spec than what I have now … but that’s where I was 20 years ago where I had less disposable cash and income. What’s appearing here wouldn’t have an issue with games like Stellaris, Motorsport Manager and I suspect it’d be ok even with shooty games and Elite if the graphics were turned down a bit.

Power supply is going to be a Corsair 650W unit for £63. Don’t get a cheap, nonbranded power supply … it’s a false economy. It’s also just £10 to go from Corsair’s 550W unit to the 650W unit. That £10 is worth it for when you’d want to later add in a graphics card.
Case – AVP K-11 Mid Tower Case with acrylic side panel. It’s the cheapest Novatech have at £20.
SSD hard disc – Crucial P1 500GB M2, NVME for £73. Don’t worry about the arcane stuff there, just look at “M2” – this is where it plugs in … and “NVME” – this means it’s faster.
Conventional hard disc – Toshiba 2GB 3.5″ desktop drive for £56. Cheapest again and I think it’s worth going up a bit from the £37 1GB drive.

And that’s it !

How much ? £494 for that little lot. It isn’t everything you might want though … What’s missing that you might have expected ?

Processor cooler – is included with the processor. I’m actually still using the AMD bundled cooler in my machine, I haven’t had a reason to do the rigmarole involved in changing it.
Graphics – there’s a basic functionality on the processor again. But this would be the first thing to change in a short term upgrade.
Optical drives – these seem to have gone out of fashion with the streaming video services. However, what I’m actually doing at the moment is to play dvds through a USB drive which uses software that comes with Windows. (£23 for dvd). You could get an external blu-ray drive for £73, although this needs software. You can get the software for free from Leawo.
Windows – you can download and run Windows 10 for free … Here’s a Tomshardware article for more info (Link – run a script or ad blocker or both). However, you get a Please Activate watermark on your desktop and some options are restricted. A Windows 10 Home OEM licence will cost a bone chilling £110.

The other items you will want are :
Keyboard – honestly, go for something really cheap. Logitech have a wired keyboard for £10. Should be just fine. I like my mechanical keyboard better but £10 level membrane keyboards are ok too.
Mouse – start around £3-£10. Best to get this in a shop where you can test the fit to your hand. Mice are all sizes and shapes and you want one you can get along with. That said, I’d look at the Logitech mice first again, I’ve had a £30 ish Logitech mouse for a few years ago and it does good.
Monitor – there’s an IPS panel 22″ LG screen in Novatech’s listing for £87 but it’s listed as “Ordered upon Request”. I’d look at the 24″ IPS panel from AOC for £150 (Scan price). IPS screens give a better image and … the monitor is probably more important than anything else in the system, it’s what you’re looking at all the time.

Better make it kitty proof.

Oh and speakers – monitors can give sound but it’s very meh. There’s a pair from Logitech for £20 that look ok. You want your speakers to have a separate power supply and a volume control that’s going to stay accessible. Mine’s buried on the desk somewhere !

Beyond all that – if you’re into the flight or space games, I’d look at picking up a Thrustmaster Hotas X for £48. I have one, it does me fine for internet spaceships. (Although I am suspecting it of causing wrist issues).
Graphics – can’t buy my 1060 3GB card any more but it was around £200. I don’t like spending more than that on graphics, there’s definitely diminishing returns. A £400 card isn’t twice as good as a £200 card. Options at the moment are :£140 ish for a 1650 and the 1660 cards start at £210.

That’s it for me for tonight ! I don’t think I’ve missed anything …

There we go ! That’s it for me for tonight. Almost bed time !

Totally not going to immediately follow up that pacifist run by murdering everything. Actually not … I want to get the stealth achievement too and murder in the Deus Ex games is kinda noisy.

Besides … I think it’s The Outer Worlds next :-).

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Hello everyone,

I found another meme …

All about games ! Let’s see … I’m going to attempt to resist repeat answers or using the same game twice. I suspect that won’t last long :-D.

1 – A game that had a lasting impression on you. Doki Doki Literature Club. I haven’t played it myself but I’ve seen a couple of people play it through on streams. This is a visual novel that starts out very cute and twee. And then dark things start happening. Very Dark Things. That’s actually one reason I’ve never played it :-D.

2 – Favourite female game character. A few months ago, this would have been Commander Shepard of the Normandy in her true Femshep form. She benefits from the amazing voice of Jennifer Hale. However … Sara Ryder of the Tempest in Mass Effect Andromeda has taken over. The game is probably too long (although that means there’s lots to do) but I like the character more. It’s a character that tends more to looking forwards to Happy, Fun and building a new life, whereas Shepard is fully locked in to knowing that she’s facing an apocalyptic future.

3 – A game that’s so bad it’s good. Hmm … I dunno actually, I think I’ll go way back to Lemmings here. A simple puzzle game but also infuriating. Not sure about this one. May edit later. Also reaching back to Cannon Fodder, simple (bad) gameplay that kept you coming to try and win.

4 – A game that hit an emotional spot in your heart. Oh that has to be Mass Effect 3. It tugged on all of the heart strings in a sequence of tragic and heroic scenarios. I think the emotional hits that keep coming are why I’ve never replayed it.

5 – Favourite game developer or studio. I think this is probably Square Enix at the moment, because I’m riding the wave of what’s actually turned out very enjoyable in Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Deus Ex Human Revolution was one of the first games I 100%’d on Steam.

Many side quests. In this one and the Mass Effects !

6 – Favourite male video game character. There might be a theme coming … Adam Jensen of the Deus Ex earlier games. I like the gravelly voice, done by Elias Toufexis. I like playing the character. He’s not an invulnerable tank, even if you do upgrade all the way. He’s a tragic figure caught up in the aftermath of just trying to do his job. And this is one reason I’ll keep going back to those games.

7 – 5 of your favourite Original Sound Tracks. Oh ‘eck … Teslagrad is one, even though I’ve never played the game. Lucasarts had a system they called iMuse for the Star Wars games, which matched authentic sounding Star Wars music with the action on screen. Mass Effect’s OST nicely accompanies the game. Stellaris has an uplifting soundtrack. And I get a relaxed happy feeling when FTL’s theme tune comes on the iTunes. Honorable mention to World of Warcraft as well.

8 – A game not enough people talk about. Motorsport Manager. It’s a good simulation game that I think kinda stuttered because not enough people heard about it.

9 – Favourite Villain (being mindful of spoilers). I think this is Mass Effect again with the Reapers. The first time they speak is a time when you, the player, will freeze, wonder what’s going on and be completely wrapped up in what’s coming next. They’re implacable, eternal and they’re coming our way …

10 – Favourite game as a kid. This is between the 1984 version of Elite, Revs and a Cricket game. I’ll go for Elite because it did that wanderlust thing.

Still going.

11 – 5 of your favourite video games – Mass Effect, Deus Ex HR and MD, Defence Grid (not played for a while), Motorsport Manager, Stellaris. And I’ll cheat by adding in Elite Dangerous too.

12 – A game or series that you’ve never been interested in. Counterstrike Go and the like. I’ve played a few of these multiplayer battle arena things but the set up puts me off. They’re fast paced, shoot everything then reset to neutral again. I like to have something story based, where your performance so far matters for what’s coming. This goes into the strategy games too, I preferred Panzer General over the other WW2 games as your army group would move through the missions with you. Similar with games like Homeworld, although I never finished that one.

13 – Favourite NPC or party member – I have a few of these. Farida Malik from Deus Ex Human Revolution would pilot you around between areas. This is a lady you definitely want to have on your side, indeed one of the missions involves you enacting a little Shanghai street justice on a playboy (he deserves it). I usually play through these games non-lethal but there’s one section where I break that, just to keep Malik alive. Also Mordin Solus in Mass Effect and very definitely – Tali’Zorah who grows marvellously through the games.

14 – A game that never gets old – simple puzzle games that don’t need fancy graphics or complicated rules. Their simplicity and gameplay keeps you coming back. Haven’t played the card games for a while …

15 – A game that everyone should play at least once – Best Fiends.

16 – A game that inspires you – This one’s tough and it’s between EarthX and Cosmoteer. Both are being made by singleton developers and it shows what truly talented people like that can do. I should have another look at Cosmoteer sometime.

17 – Favourite genre – I think this is story games now and this has changed over the years. It seems like the best way to carry those stories through at the moment is to put the player in the persona of the main protagonist. First person / Third person games have been working well for me there, whereas I’ll bounce off games like the isometric Pathfinder or Baldur’s Gate.

18 – That game you REALLY should have played by now – the original Deus Ex ! It came out in 2000, I acquired it years after release and while I’ve played DXHR to death and I think I’ll play through DXMD a few times, I’ve only played the tutorial level of the original game.

19 – Favourite indie game you played recently – EarthX. It’s still in development, I have it in early access but it shows enough promise that I made that step to acquire it. It’s a rocket company simulator and it felt pretty good in my first look around Xmas.

20 – A game that truly scared the something out of you – Prey (newer one). I’ve only played the first few bits of this and the ambience was already getting me massively on edge. This is one that plays with the sound, is that rattle in the background something being dislodged or is it a mimic mimicing a coffee cup before it jumps you. Part of why I’ve not played that much is because I think I need a new graphics card again to appreciate it, part because it’s really unsettling.

Not really. I’m saving the end of Deus Ex Mankind Divided for another night. I’m trying to not game too late at the moment … so that I’m more likely to get some good sleep in. Gaming too late means your mind is still buzzing on that.

Over to videos and more of Excession by Iain M Banks !

Hello everyone,

Almost a week again ! I’m slipping 🙂 Although I think I’m still somewhat on target for my usual aim of 100 posts a year even before things like Inktober and another Advent series of posts. Might need a little time travel though.

The perspective lost its way at the top and I’m still figuring out how to fit the legs and tail in but I think this one worked out ok and the people that it happened for seemed happy with it. This one happened as a rapid sketch done over a lunch time with the finishing and colouring done after logging off for the day. It’s definitely better than the 6 days of IT Depression I did in another lunchtime way back :

That was from March last year.

Inktober’s definitely something I can do in the isolation, Advent might need more creativity … The marshmallows were tasty but sadly not enough variation, I would have thought they’d put more of their variously different marshmallows in but sadly just the 6. I’ve enjoyed the various Star Wars advent calendars over the years but I’ve been increasingly feeling like they’ve been getting mined out. Plus the post a day format can be a bit burny out on the mind, especially if you have the sense that you need a certain number of words to go with the theme given.

How am I doing at the moment ? I’m ok, although if you’d asked after I breathed in a chunk of extra strong mint yesterday I’d have answered different ! Oops. It felt like a rock as soon as I coughed it out of my airway and the neighbours probably wondered what was going on. All good now and I was managing to not cough too much while doing the fortnightly shopping run last night.

I think we’re in for more extensions of the lockdowns here. It’s not like the lockdown’s been lifted, it’s more that people are too dumb to observe a healthy respect for the bug that’s going around and our government is too weak to give a worthwhile enforceable and sensible way to go. I think that’ll lead to a bouncing up again this week and next and a needless extension of the tragedy.

Hopefully I’ll be proved wrong there ! I’d like to be out and about again doing the more fun part of my job as well as wandering around places seeing shiny things and especially … seeing friends again.

Enough of that though …

Book and game ! I’ve just finished reading through Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds and I’m steadily getting more drawn in to Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Game first ?

Go on then. I’ve recorded 16 hours in Deus Ex Mankind Divided (DXMD from here) and from nearly giving up on it early, I’m pretty well drawn into it now. Some of the reason for that is that they throw you into a prologue scenario with all of your augmented powers available, partly so they can give you a series of tutorials on them. The cover system is different, I think I’m getting used to it but there are occasions where I end up vaulting over a Something into the midst of a bunch of enemies.

You’re not particularly tanky in this game, 2 enemies can be too much early on, making 3 enemies aware of you is usually Reload. The true way to play through is sneaky sneaky grabby thumpy, where you should be handling the missions through stealth and secrecy instead of shooty death. There’s actually another reason for that too … being merciful and non lethal gives you slightly more experience too, which may count in the end letting you turn on another augmentation slightly earlier.

Finding some fun characters too. Not sure about what they think of book clubs though.

But I’ll be back to the nice lady’s shop again later to see what she’s got for sale.

This is actually a sign of the times with this game. It was made in 2016 when faces and face animation were a continuing development area in games … They’d cracked being able to make amazing looking backgrounds and worlds :

I did like that one.

Not so sure about that one. I wonder if the impression to give was one of “I’d like something of what they’re taking please”.

I’ve got to the stage now where Prague is at night although I didn’t take a screenshot of that last night.

But yeah, I’m steadily being drawn in to the story on this one, I’ve been recognising that perhaps some of the side missions need a little patience and waiting before you do them too. I think I’ll have another crack at a couple of them today and see what happens and after this one finishes, I think it’ll be The Outer Worlds which appeared from the Epic Store on Friday.

Book ? I finished Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds this week.

Another interesting addition to the Inhibitors trilogy although I think this suffers from the Middle Book Problem. These don’t have a real introduction to the universe, that’s the job of the first book. They don’t have a real conclusion, that’s the job of the last book. They’re there to develop and bring on the plot of the Ark. Also somewhat to get everything in place for the last book. The Expanse series has felt a bit like this too, it feels like a trilogy of trilogies.

A little about the universe – it’s the Human sphere around 700 years in the future. Humanity has spread to and colonised a variety of other worlds with the story being based around the backwater Resurgam system and previously important but now devastated Yellowstone. Humanity rose … and then fell due to the impact of the Melding Plague, which mixes the biological with the mechanical in disastrous ways. This series is based in the late aftermath of this as humanity discovers and confronts what Iain M. Banks called an Outside Context Problem, encountering something utterly alien and infinitely beyond humanity’s own capabilities. Or is it …

Oh and trade and interstellar travel is done mostly via Lighthuggers, spaceships that accelerate to just below the speed of light taking subjective decades to get from system to system. At some point, I’ll try a drawing of them although I get the impression that Elite’s Imperial Cutter strongly resembles them with a cylindrical shell, tapering at bow and stern with an engine attached to each port and starboard on structural spars. Oh and they’re 4km long too which is quite a bit longer than Elite’s Imperial Cutter.

I’ll try the usual thing of avoiding spoilers but this one’s got :
Interstellar spaceship chase – a good one too.
Megalomaniac characters – several of them.
Intrigue – aplenty.
Character flaws from psychotic to sociopathic to isolationist – makes for good reading.
Apocalyptic machines – impending.
Healthy respect for physics – no cheating with faster than light.
And a steady development of the various threads before they’re drawn together in the last 100 or so pages.

One thing curious is that there are several big event type things which other authors would have spun out to another 100 or so pages each, however instead they’re compressed into a summary of just a couple of pages. I think this actually works pretty well ! And the book is a very healthy 646 pages already.

I’d recommend reading an Alastair Reynolds or two. I didn’t enjoy Chasm City and heavily bounced off that one. I definitely enjoyed the various shenanigans running throughout Revelation Space and Revenger and Redemption Ark is a good middle book for its series.

What’s next ? I’ve started reading Excession. This is an Iain M. Banks book set in his Culture universe, where they face their own Outside Context Problem. One issue with the Culture books is that the Culture tends to be assured of its own superiority, this one shakes that superiority at its foundation making it a really compelling book and one I’ll enjoy reading again.

Later ! More tales of the augmented struggle in Prague first.

Hello everyone,

I think I might be playing the wrong games at the moment …

But before I dive in to that, a little about the announcement yesterday … Cor blimey what was that ? I’m not going to go into it at all here, you’ll be seeing plenty about that around the internet at the moment and if you’re lucky, you’ll be missing the more rabid stuff that’ll be going on the internet at the moment about Stuff. My opinion ? It’ll be in the tags at the bottom of the post.

Anyway, with that out the way, I hope you are all well. I’ve been a bit up and down lately, although I don’t think there’s anything sinister behind that. Let’s see :

Headaches – I’ll come back to those.
The usual wrist soreness – managing that at the moment. I think reading is helping, more of that later as I’m only 130 pages from the end of Redemption Ark and it’s been properly kicking off in there.
Eye strangeness – I’m well overdue having new glasses. One eye is giving sharp images, one has shifted into a bit of blurriness and I think that might be contributing to headaches.
Friday was a bit too toasty and I think I overheated.
And the usual hayfeverish type things.
I don’t there’s anything sinister in there but I do need to change the glasses and I think I need to ditch at least one of the games I’m about to talk about …

2 games today – Rebel Galaxy and Deus Ex Mankind Divided (DXMD). I think I’m going to be dropping both of those … Rebel Galaxy because the visual effects are causing headaches and DXMD because while it looks gorgeous, it’s also rather buggy. I might go back to both later though.

That’s Rebel Galaxy and the starter ship called Rasputin. I’ve since upgraded past Iceangel :

That picture is showing one of the problems actually … massive over done lens flare. Oh and as always, click for bigger on these.

That one is my current ship, a Tennhausen ship named Runner of Blades for the quote at the end of Bladerunner. There’s another bit of that lens flare creeping in there.

That’s the real problem. You travel around the various nodes in a warp system with lots of that lens flare plus added camera shake too. Oh and there’s motion blur as well. I think the combination of all that was triggering headaches … And they don’t seem to have gone away with turning those particular effects off. A shame because this one’s a nice game to play with genuine scope for winning through tactics.

And it can be rather pretty too.

Still, if a game is bad for you either mentally or physically – walk away. Find other games. They’re supposed to be things that you enjoy, not things that make you ill. Warcraft is another of those, the posture and play style I was adopting was doing horrid things to my shoulder.

The other game I’ve been looking at is Deus Ex Mankind Divided which I talked a bit about last time. This might get the walk away from treatment as well. Whereas its predecessor, Human Revolution, was tightly produced, bug free (I noticed one that brought chuckles) and worked extremely well as a game, Mankind Divided feels like it was rushed out in a much less than perfect state. It’s also infected with the fad of that time : power boosting microtransactions. I’ve been ok with the cosmetic microtransactions in Elite, mostly because they contribute to great looking screenshots … but day 0 content DLC and power boosts are a bit naughty. Human Revolution had some of that as well.

It has bugs, some of them game breaking. Some of them just annoying in terms of having to reload from a save if they hit. But …

That’s one from tonight’s session. I’ve tweaked the shadows a bit and a couple of other settings. I didn’t push it too far, because the graphics card I have isn’t really capable of driving this game at its highest settings. Going for the max will cause frame rate disruptions which ultimately mean headaches again.

I was remembering to observe my social distancing on the in game underground system … This is a curious element of the game actually. There are two sides to this particular corridor, a normal human side and an Augmented human side. This game very definitely plays to the digital apartheid card, with your character being one of those augmented humans who is on the bad side of that discrimination. Augs go to the back of the train, need special papers, are disqualified from a lot of work and while it isn’t nearly as bad as apartheid was and is in real life, it’s noticeable.

I’m going to leave that subject alone though here. I’m not subject to racism in real life, so I have no inkling as to the real horrors that I know people are subjected to. I can get away from the digital apartheid in DXMD by closing the game, that’s an immense difference to real life.

The thing I think I need to take away from it is to keep a part of myself watching out for anything similar coming from me and stamp it out. We’re all humans who deserve and should expect equal treatment.

Back to the graphics ! This is from walking around a bit more and I was noticing the shadows and reflections. (You may want to click for bigger again !) The quality in this game is getting particularly stunning and I think if I were to stick with it, I might be persuaded to invest in a stronger graphics card.

And that’s one from an internal location ! It looks stunning doesn’t it.

Just a couple of problems … if you can see “Shooting range” to the left, tonight’s session ended when I tried to enter that (side mission) and the game crashed to desktop. Apparently that’s a well known issue caused by inventory swapping.

I had another known issue with storage compartments associated with the microtransaction equipment boosts. The game interface can cease responding as soon as you try interacting with these storage boxes. I had this 4 years ago, had it again last week.

There is the critical level crash to desktop bug with the lighting which stopped me playing this game when it came out. I haven’t had this recently (it was a game vs AMD problem and I now have an nVidia card) but that bug is still likely to be in the game.

The game is 4 years old, the bugs are known, no fixes have come out for them. That’s negligent. And even without those bugs, the game just isn’t as good as its predecessors, Deus Ex and DXHR.

But it does look stunningly gorgeous doesn’t it.

Next games ? I’m thinking XCom 2 as the more relaxed playstyle game and quite possibly Alien Isolation as the first person run and hide and if you shoot you’re already dead type game :-D.

Stay safe everyone ! If you can avoid going out, please do, keep that distancing up if you do, hopefully this current situation will be behind us sooner rather than later.

Yep. Struggling a little with the last part of that attempt at alliteration :-).

This one might get a little geeky so bear with me 🙂 There are shiny screenshots coming … These are all going to be from Deus Ex Mankind Divided, which came out in 2016 and I mentioned it briefly on Monday too. I had the daft idea of doing a little screenshot comparison. Here’s what it was like 4 years ago :

You’ll definitely want to click for bigger on these to get the detail. That was on my last machine, which at the time was powered by an Intel i5-2500k chip and an AMD Radeon R9 380 graphics card running the game at 1080p. I bounced off the game back then due to bugs, including a nasty crash to desktop bug caused by the AMD card not liking some of the lighting effects on show. The game also manages to be far more clunky to play than the one that came before due to opening up the gameplay more. That just sounds wrong doesn’t it … but whereas Deus Ex Human Revolution was a beauty of a game to play because what it did was limited, it did that superbly well … Mankind Divided manages to make it awkward.

A quick aside – there have been a series of games in the Deus Ex universe, in release order :
Deus Ex – came out in 2000, set in 2052 and was way ahead of its time. A mix of rpg, action, fps, stealth, letting you choose the way you wanted to succeed in each mission. I need to play this one.
Deus Ex 2 Invisible War – came out in 2003, set in 2072. It went back to more shooty gameplay apparently and isn’t recommended.
Deus Ex Human Revolution – released in 2011, set in 2027. I loved this game and sunk 216 wonderful hours into it over several play throughs. I like the characters, the story and the gameplay is limited … but wonderful.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided – released in 2016, set in 2029. Not quite sure what to think of this one, need to play it more before making a decision over whether to finish it.
(There’s also Deus Ex The Fall and Deus Ex Go but we don’t talk about those).

Screenies ? A table first :

I looted that from an article on Bit-Tech, which I’d recommend reading if you’re interested in more of a subjective comparison with benchmark numbers … I think some of their numbers are limited by their processor though. If the fps numbers are exactly the same across a set of different cards, then the graphics card isn’t what’s holding things up.

We’ll start off with Low settings … and to make this set of screenshots I was working off a quick save and then taking the screenshot not long after reloading with different settings. The machine is Meltdown, running with a Ryzen 5 3600 with 32GB coupled with a 3GB 1060 graphics card. I’ll come back to that later. They were all taken at 2560×1440 aka 1440p.

That’s low, which turns off all the fancy options and works off the lowest quality textures. A game like this will have a flat picture that is the basic texture and then it’ll paint the textures over a surface map. Lighting and obstructions will be added and the texture sharpened up by Anisotropic Filtering. The more fancy effects, the more power is needed to put the picture on the screen … preferably as many times per second as possible because that gives you smoother gameplay.

Moving on to Medium and introduction of Volumetric Lighting and Bloom instantly make themselves known by how much brighter the scene is. This is what partly confused me about the 2016 screenshot, I thought I must have taken it later on in the game because the sandstorm was apparently blocking out more of the light. Check out the rays of the sun too. Mind you, I think some of the detail is actually being lost due to the bloom being a little too bright.

This is High and to be honest, I’m struggling to see the differences here. The table is saying that this level introduced Screenspace Reflections plus Anti-aliasing (smoothing of lines), Motion Blur (nope, turn it off), Sharpen, Cloth Physics and Subspace Scattering. I suspect I’d notice the Cloth Physics most of all that and the reflection in the water (middle left) are better defined. The texture on the floor is also a little more detailed.

Moving on to Very High and this is where the game starts telling me off for having a graphics card with insufficient memory … This level adds in Tessellation, increases the Ambient Occlusion (not drawing stuff that’s covered up), Contact Hardening Shadows, increases Depth of Field and Shadow Quality. I think the game was starting to have some issues at this point. I think the lighting was a little better again here, looking at the half submerged triangle thing. Depth of Field shows up with there being many more trees on the shoreline and there are differences in the shadows on the buildings too.

Last one for this series, this is Ultra, with all of the nice things turned on. I can’t actually see much difference in this scene to be honest … can you ?

I have a couple more, from where I am currently in the game. It’s early days still …

That’s Ultra, which was chugging a bit and I wouldn’t have wanted to play the game for long at this setting due to framerates. It can be ok for wandering around but you need those frames when the shooting happens not so much for smooth pictures, you need it for smooth gameplay.

And the same scene at High. The big difference I’m seeing is in the quality of the shadows plus Ultra sees sharper detail in the cobblestones. And a weird change in the quickbar thing too apparently … Ultra also fuzzies things down a bit as well with the shadows and lighting.

A couple more … here’s how the system was on Ultra :

And on High :

It’s not using the cpu as much as it could and the cpu usage is around the same for both Ultra and High. But the big difference is in the graphics thing below. In High, the card is approaching its capability limit which is the point where it’ll start slowing things down. In Ultra, the card is maxed out.

Time for dinner for me now but I hope you like all the shiny pictures. As far as Deus Ex Mankind Divided goes :
It is nicely shiny and detailed compared to Human Revolution. Definitely a good upgrade there in terms of environments and how the game shows them off.
Human Revolution looked fantastic when it came out but the people didn’t look great and the environments were simplified. Mankind Divided benefits from 5 years of rapid improvement in graphics technology.
The gameplay somehow went backwards and might be why I walk away before finishing the game.
I haven’t come across characters I took to like Farida and Pritchard yet. I usually go non-lethal for Human Revolution … except for one sequence where I don’t know how to save Farida without going lethal. Cos I like that one.
It’s worth playing around a bit with the settings to see what’s worth boosting.

But not tonight cos I’m hungry.

Actually chicken and mushroom pastry things tonight because I like to munch those first from what I get on a shopping run.

Stay safe, be well !

Hello everyone,

I have to report a little bit of getting caught in Deus Ex Mankind Divided tonight, so this one is coming out a bit later than intended ! Oops. Bit hungry now too (dinner’s just gone in).

It’s one of those days today that’s kind of been appropriated …

Star Wars has been around for pretty much all my life and it’s a kind of up and down thing with it too. Some Star Wars is amazing. Some is utterly rubbish. It’s at its best when it’s either being silly, or if it’s ignoring the wider Star Wars universe and letting the characters have their head. Sadly, that doesn’t happen too much in the movies but about half of the old Expanded Universe books were amazing for it. In particular, the writing of Timothy Zahn who is continuing to write in the universe, Michael Stackpole who started the excellent XWing series and Aaron Allston who continued the XWing books with Wraith Squadron.

This one’s going to be a bit of a journey back through some old pictures … And a new one or two maybe.

After the books and the movies, the first Star Wars game that I was around was a board game …

Old one too. I have the fond memories of this being played when I was really young. Very nebulous memories now though cos it was like, last century. I was entranced with the various arcade games too and there were a couple on the BBC B too, recreating that famous Trench Run sequence. We of course hacked them (they were written in BASIC) to make it possible to win. Good times. There was also one for the Battle Of Hoth which I didn’t have much chance to play with until later. Must actually install Rogue Squadron at some point because I think that has it in. I was a better pilot back then too.

One of the more modern ones is Knights of the Old Republic, which melded a variation of D&D’s 3rd edition rules with lightsabers and blasters and a pretty decent story to produce a groundbreaking game back in 2004.

Great graphics there too. Actually pretty decent for the characters, although there’s very little customisation there and flattened textures.

There’s Deus Ex Mankind Divided from today, a game that came out 12 years later. Back to Star Wars !

Always a good one for a meme.

Wonder what that one did …

I do like a bit of cantina band music.

Thankfully I have, after having an increasing headache yesterday evening, I’ve been free of that today. Not sure why though, I seemed to be having trouble nodding off again last night.

There’s been the models too. I quite enjoyed this one.

 Definitely enjoyed creating that. I even have an extra Snowspeeder now …

There we go. Not sure if I posted those build pics before … It’s felt a little like I’ve had to hold back some of the Lego build stuff for me and not necessarily post them.

Some of the humour is great.

I’ve always been a fan of the spaceships. TIE Fighter was another great game, although I think I’d struggle to stay with it for long if I went back to it. It was the successor to XWing and saw you flying for the Empire. There was an intriguing storyline running through the game, tying the missions together and it was a pleasure to play through it. Even if it did share the tendency of games around that time (1995ish) where they would increase the gameplay length by just making the missions have insane difficulty.

I did enjoy setting up those Battle of Hoth snow scenes outside the front door.

And I am soooo close to trying to install the old Star Wars Pod Racer game too. That was another one that got the best out of the limited capabilities of the machines at the time but that didn’t matter because the racing in the game was fantastic.

And there we have BB-8. Some of the best characters in the movies are the droids (and some of the worst too!) The people writing BB-8’s antics got it spot on with this little one.

I had a suggestion to go see Legoland and when I eventually found my way there, it wasn’t too long before texts along the lines of “THIS IS AMAZING” were being sent to people :-D. I’d like to go again sometime when the current crisis calms down.

Something I’ve massively enjoyed over the years has been the Advent Calendars. I wasn’t sure if I’d do it again this year (after burning out on the books the other year) but it was good combining it with Marshmallows, Elitecember and the Mass Effect pictures.

Whew ! That’s a lot of pictures. Let’s see how to finish :
Best film : Rogue One, by a long way. Very few of the movies get me close to a tear or two but this one definitely does.
Best book : The XWing books. Because they’re fun and choosing all of them lets me cheat outrageously.
Best game : Pod Racer, after TIE Fighter. The sad thing with a lot of the Star Wars games is that they don’t really do justice with the universe and miss the mark when it comes to Fun. But these two managed it.
Best TV series : Clone Wars. Haven’t seen The Mandalorian.
Best theme ? Star Wars has always had amazing music and there’s no mistaking The Imperial March or some of the battle music. It’s always been perfectly complementary to what’s happening on screen.
Best character : BB-8 and Rey. Although I did like Poe Dameron too in the end. What am I thinking – it’s Rose, always Rose, only Rose.

Anything more ?

I’ll have to find a time to watch The Mandalorian at some point.

Star Wars isn’t the best space fantasy out there, not by a long way. But it caught the mood at just the right time, it grabbed that interest and held it through a fantastic original trilogy and it’s brought out a lot more great stories too.

Stay safe be well everyone !

We want more math!

I’ve been thinking about techie purchases again …

Well, it’s actually been sparked off by seeing comments about really (daftly) expensive gaming PCs and I thought I’d check the market again. One thing about getting techie stuff, it’s good for the mind to just completely ignore the market for at least 3 months, preferably 6, after acquiring upgrades. Because if you’d just held on a few more weeks, you could have picked up something cheaper and better.

Personally, I think I did ok because I pulled the upgrade trigger for Meltdown (this PC) a couple of weeks after AMDs excellent new Ryzen 3000s came out. I’d had enough time to see if they were any good for performance and heating but managed to get bits before the stock ran out. Don’t be an early adopter if you can help it, let someone else beta test the stuff first.

This post has two parts to it though … There’s a few items I’m looking into acquiring relatively soon, although not while we’re in lockdown conditions. The items can wait and it’s not fair on an already overloaded postal service.

Before I go diving in to naming companies though – disclosure note : I’ve never had anything provided by a hardware manufacturer, this is all stuff I’ve bought.

The bits I want are keyboard, flightstick and a graphics card.
Keyboard – this one is double bouncing more and more. I should really take the case off to see how much of a clean it needs (probably a lot). I’m looking at Logitech, Corsair and the own brand one from the local computer store (you know, the big one that shall not be named) actually feels good too. The own brand one is around £50, the Logitech and Corsair mechanical keyboards are around £100. It’s worth it to go up the scale to mechanical because they feel really nice to type on.

Flightstick – probably more Logitech, with the X52 that they inherited from Saitek :

It has many buttons. This is a bit unnecessary though because my Thrustmaster Hotas X is still pretty strong and my hands mostly get on well with it. That’s the real issue, the tendons that control the outside of my right hand are getting sore more and more lately.

And the last one is a graphics card. I have a nVidia 1060 3GB which was still offering great performance with Mass Effect Andromeda (probably my most stressing game) and it makes Elite Dangerous look amazing. But it’s 3 year old technology in an area where performance is still improving fast. The issue here is that I look at £180-£220 graphics cards, think anything more than that is overpriced and there is nothing interesting in that range. The 1650 cards are typically £170, these would be a step backwards. The 1660 cards start at £210, this isn’t an upgrade worth the money. The potential card is the 2060, at £310. I think not.

The 1060, 1650, 1660 and 2060 numbers there are all for the generation of cards and how high up the range they are. The 16×0 cards came after the 10×0 cards and the 2060 has extra performance bits included.

I’ll be holding on to my cash for now. Everything else is just fine. Monitor’s great, the Ryzen chip powering the desktop is excellent, I have future proofing for years and the (Logitech) mouse does me great too.

New techie stuff is always nice though.

But how about if we go money no object … What would I actually get ? This won’t be the absolute max components though. There are things I wouldn’t go up to for reasons. For comparison purposes, Meltdown ended up costing about £900, not including the graphics card.

The core of all machines is the processor, motherboard and memory. With the benefit of knowing how good the AMD chips are now, it has to be :
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32 core (64 thread) at £1,957. Yep. Bit daft and not actually the best chip. There’s a 64 core chip as well, the big difference is speed. The 32 core chip goes at 3.7GHz, the 64 core chip goes at 2.9GHz (it’s also £3,700). Considering that most applications will see most of those cores being idle, go for the higher GHz.
This has a TRX40 socket which tells you which motherboard you need. In this case, I’m looking at the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme costing £770. This is “E-ATX”, which determines what cases you can look at.
Memory – the specs tell you what to get as well here, in this case the cpu page says it wants DDR4-3200. (Double Data Rate 4x running at 3.2GHz). You could get faster … but you wouldn’t get much benefit from that. Systems aren’t held up by memory, they’re held up by hard discs although if you buy silly amounts of memory, the spare will be used to hold info instead of going to the slow hard discs all the time. Memory comes in sticks and it’s best to get matched pairs (they work in parallel). I’m kinda surprised that the 32GB I got from Kingston last year is still £180.

Polish that core off with a nVidia 2080 Ti card costing … £1,100 and you’ve got the core of an incredibly fast machine that costs over 4x what mine did and it’s not complete yet.

Keeping the budget honest means you have cash left over for other things, like Lego Star Destroyers (got my eye on the new A-Wing), movies, going out to catch up with lovely people (hopefully soon although +3weeks from now at least) and marshmallows from the internet people. Budgeting well means you can enjoy more stuff, rather than looking at just one megashiny thing.

I digress … Every PC needs a case to go in, plus a few more things :

This looks all right and it doesn’t have stuff I’m not interested in like flashy distracting lights. That’s an E-ATX box from Phanteks and apparently has 5/5 for its review score. The case was the only thing I got burned on for Meltdown and that was from lack of research. £95 for this case and it looks like it’s got the necessary like fans front and back and drive bays that I haven’t used in Meltdown’s box.
A computer needs a power supply and it’s Essential that you get a decent quality one. Power supplies do implode and the budget ones will damage components as they go bang. This system will likely gobble the power more too, so it’s a 1200W unit from Corsair costing £240. In comparison, Meltdown has I think 750W costing £75.
Cooling is important too, we want something big and metally to keep this cool. I’m looking at the Noctua NH-D14 dual 140mm fan cooler costing £75. The bigger the fans, the more diameter they have and the better the cooling. They can spin slower as well, which means you don’t hear them and that’s really important. (Normally, I’d look at £40 on a cooler).

Notice a lack of water cooling … Cooling with water came back into fashion when kits appeared which made it very easy to implement. But. You still have fans on a radiator that make noise, you have a pump which makes noise and the fluid is subject to biogrowth which can gum up the works if the biocidal additives degrade and become ineffective. Having a water cooling system go wrong is an incredibly expensive disaster. If air cooling goes wrong, you’ll see it on the monitoring applications first and it’ll fail just as crashes that shouldn’t get as far as physical damage.

Air cooling is maintenance free (outside of occasional dusting), water cooling is not.

Storage is next and I’m going to go for a slightly Mad Scientist solution … I only use 1 set of drives in my machines because I like to live dangerously with reliability but there is a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) which lets you duplicate data across multiple drives so if one goes bang, the data is available on the other one. But … there’s a catch. If the drives all come from the same batch and are used the same way, they’re likely to fail at the same time. So :

SSDs (need these for speed) : Crucial 1TB M2 drive costing £110, plus a backup from Kingston costing £171.
Conventional (slower but masses of data space) : 6TB drives from Toshiba (£200) and Western Digital (£270). These are more expensive than most 6TB because they spin faster, which means less time to get to the data and it’s quicker to read it off the disc. (This might be a moot point due to the electronics)

What’s left ?

Keyboards and mice are heavily up to the individual preference but I’d steer people towards mechanical keyboards and gaming mice with reviews that say they stay reliable. Around £150. That sounds a huge amount … but they’re how you interact with the machine, which is the most important aspect of all. It’s worth it to spend more here.
Flightstick depends on what you want to use it for. There’s loads of toys and addons you can get if you’re into flight sims but I’d be happy with the £50 Hotas X or the £130ish X52s.
Monitor is a key one too. The things to look for here are “IPS Panel”, which makes the monitor have a crisper image that can be seen from more angles. I’m very happy with my 24″ 1440p monitor from AOC, if they’re any bigger than that physically, I struggle to see the sides of them. Yep, I think a monitor can be Too Big :-D. It would probably cost around £200 to replace mine. Again, it’s worth spending extra here because it’s how you interact with the machine. I’d actually look at having two screens here, one for game, one for everything else although I’d need a bigger desk too.
You’ll want speakers or a headset as well, again this one’s up to the reader. Personally, I have a cheap set of desk speakers that do a great job. Headsets are definitely and literally what fits on your head !

It’s good to look after your hands and eyes.

And the last bit is that you will need a Windows 10 licence … as it’s a pain to try and play games on Linux. This is £110.

And that all adds up to …

Way too much. Don’t spend that much on a computer ! Spend only to what you need, save money for more important things.

Stay safe, be well !