Author: Sleepypete

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 !

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all being well. I’ve been trying out a new game … Well, a not that old game but today’s the first time I’ve gone back into it for a while. What’s the game ?

Coming in to land in a ship who’s name, alas, escapes me for now. The start of No Mans Sky sees you emerge into consciousness on a far flung planet, with no memory of what’s gone before.

In my case for this game, a fairly radioactive planet with lots of orange and yellow. The game leads you in to what it has to offer reasonably gently although I’m sure I’ll forget it all as I go. When the game originally came out, the idea was to steadily make your way to the galactic centre, upgrading your systems and ship as you went.

Ship definitely starts as a fixer upper. It’s a short, stubby affair but I kinda like it.

Don’t mind the “Omg it’s a bit on fire” look. All fixed up now. Venturing further, I find myself at an abandoned base …

Yep. That’s radioactive dust being kicked up. Only slightly cooked. This place had that Merhetic Seal or whatever it was I needed to get the ship going.

One major difference between this one and Elite is that as well as having the space ship stuff, this game is really more about the ground exploration.

Found that one later … A distress call leaving a mysteriously abandoned ship and no traces of the previous owner. Where could they have gone ? I don’t think I’ll be flying that ship for a while it’s pretty broken.

Oh ! I have my own base too !

Looks great doesn’t it. Dunno about the neighbours in the more sophisticated facility a little bit further off there. They’re mysteriously missing too. Wonder where they went ? My little hut now has a teleporter device attached too which apparently brings your ship back too.

I do like that big space station. Very … round. Populated too with odd aliens, although I need to explore in order to learn their languages. Perhaps to them, I am the odd one. If they think that then they’re excellent judges of character.

Lots more to do, although I disappeared out of the game earlier due to impending hunger. A nice start, a pretty game, wondering where it’ll go, hoping that upping the graphics options is going to make it even prettier without affecting frame rate too much.

I’m very confident that the Ryzen 5 3600 in Meltdown will handle it without too much effort but my graphics card is probably starting to show age now. It doesn’t have the graphics memory (3GB card) that the heaviest and most detailed texture work needs.

A good start though.

Ship needs a name too ! The first word of her name is “Radiant”, I think the second is “Duster” but I’m not sure. Radiant Duster is a decent name.

Stay safe, be well everyone.

2 games today !

And a book maybe too.

I’m attempting to settle my bouncing between games down to just about 3 or 4 at a time … Elite and the flying is one, a first person shooter style will be another and the last game will be much more hands off, letting my dodgy wrists recuperate a bit.

The hands off game is currently transitioning from Motorsport Manager over to probably Pathfinder Kingmaker. That’s a role playing game set in the Pathfinder rules set that is essentially an offshoot from D&D. It’s a curious start so far, although I’ve been faced with having to remove and reinstall the game tonight in order to reverse damage due to mods … (oops, no additional portraits for now). Probably more on Pathfinder at a later date, although that’s much less impressive in the visuals compared to games like Elite or Mass Effect Andromeda.

One fun thing about Elite is the lighting. You can usually depend on the lighting to change on the planets between landing one evening and taking off the next.

Same place, different day. I do like landing on the edges of the canyons. The surface features are interesting, especcially with that shadowing in there in the abyss.

Found some nice places on the way back.

But every journey comes to a conclusion at some point and this is Tea-89’s final docking at Medupe Station. I’ve switched back to the big Tiamat’s Chariot now, although I haven’t played since docking up on Thursday.

I have names and a callsign for 2 more ships now …
Dolphin or Beluga class : Chasing The Rainbow
This one is named after my last Warcraft guild, Chasing Rainbows. I didn’t stay in the game for too long with that guild but they were a fun bunch led by the lovely pair of Katherine of Sky and Caledorn the Tentacle Lord and after hearing that Caledorn was using the Sleepydwagonman name in his Stellaris play through, I thought I had to give something back. Chasing The Rainbow needs a callsign though.

Type to be determined : Tea and Medals, callsign VOLT-5.
This one is for the Eve Online people, some of who I still keep in touch with. There’s some very good friends there. I haven’t played Eve in years but Tea and Medals fired off a “That’s fun!” and I do like to indulge that. The name is for my first corporation in Eve, Back Home In Time For Tea And Medals and the callsign is for the 5 founder corporations of our alliance.

I think Dark Mercenary might appear as well at some point as another WoW themed name and there are many more people I’d love to name ships after as well. But I am a little limited by wanting to keep real life friend names off here … and all the ships will be captured in Inara and EDSM (links to the right) so the names would appear on the internet at some point.

After hearing one of the best of its music come over the iTunes just now, I’m tempted to have a look at Teslagrad. It was a freebie acquired through Humble Bundle and its music is magical. Here’s a link to the theme. When I transferred my library over to the new laptop, a lot of the game soundtracks didn’t make it because they’re a bit too bland and non-memorable. But even though I haven’t played the game, the Teslagrad soundtrack stood out.

I’ve enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda, although at 76 hours to complete the game to 96%, that felt like a decade !

There are some amazing visuals in there.

Creepy, mysterious locations.

Spectacular places.

Otherworldly structures.

I’m glad I went back to this one and finished it. It had massive criticism when it came out, most of which I think was down to the Star Wars factor where the fan base becomes massively unsatisfied with what comes next with their favourite series. In the case of Mass Effect, the story was well and truly concluded at the end of Mass Effect 3, so where could they go with the next game ?

Answer, an epic quest to another galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy. A new place, with new challenges, fresh enemies, interesting allies and updated ways of playing in the universe. The combat was genuinely more fluid than what we’ve seen before, with movement playing much more of a part. The setting was a more peaceful set up, with an unarmed scout ship and an unarmed rover. It was fun doing Mako Mountain Climbing in Mass Effect 1 but I really disliked the hovertank of ME2 and I can’t remember ground vehicles being a thing at all in ME3.

Another reason ME Andromeda got a bad rap when it was released was because it was released unfinished. Animations and faces came out weird. There are bugs in there around the quest and journal system (although these are nowhere near as bad as the ME3 bugs). Sara Ryder, the female option for the protagonist and your character, was described as ultra derpy. I actually liked this, added to the charm. Plus as the story goes, she (redacted) as a chronological 22 year old. She’s allowed to be just starting to figure things out at that age.

What I find weird is that finding fault in things like that, graphics that look as good as that.

And they do look really good.

There are elements to the game I don’t like. Couldn’t stand Liam, loved Peebee. Game went on too long … but this meant there was a lot to do. Some of the time, that felt like busywork but it spaced out the heavier themed main missions more. And the enemy was pretty brutal too.

I don’t think I’ll go back to this game for a good long while because it did take a long time to finish but it was a good journey.

The next game of this style is probably going to be Deus Ex Mankind Divided, because the series on this by Hannah Lomadia is coming up on my upcoming video playlists and I’d like to play it before it does. I also played the hell out of Deus Ex Human Revolution, loved that game. Mankind Divided is the sequel but I bounced off it when it came out because my machine at the time wasn’t really up to playing it.

Definitely more to come there.

What else is on the list ? Maybe a bit of No Mans Sky as well. This one is another space exploration type game that I bounced off, also due to trouble getting it to run. (It didn’t like the monitor scaling I use on this 1440p screen).

I think I nearly mentioned book as well. I have abandoned a book ! First time in a while. I was highly intrigued and interested by Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, so when Rama II appeared as, I believe, a Humble Bundle thing, it went on my list of things to read. Trouble is, Rama II isn’t really an Arthur C. Clarke book, it’s a Gentry Lee book and it shows. Whereas Rendezvous With Rama was a short, tight, hard scifi book that came in, told its story and waved good bye again quickly, Rama II is not about the scifi and it’s definitely not short or tight. I read a third of it before giving up. It took that long for them to get to the second Rama. Most of that third was tedious interpersonal human drama between instantly dislikeable characters. A lot of it was wasted with heavy handed over descriptive prose about concepts that Arthur C. Clarke would have conveyed to the reader with nonchalant efficiency.

After getting a bit sick of the book after that third, I looked up reviews which pretty much confirmed what I thought already and … said it would get worse.

Next up is Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. It’s the sequel to Revelation Space, set in the medium future (27th century) where humanity is among the stars and both different and the same. A few interesting characters have made themselves known so far and one characteristic of Alastair Reynolds characters is that while you’re in their heads with the prose, you never really know where they’re going to go.

I think I’ll be enjoying more of that book in about 1 minute after hitting post ! Well, maybe 5 minutes after catching up on Twit/Book and Discord.

See you soon, stay safe, be well.

As the current crisis continues, it’s starting to feel a bit strange like the days are blurring into each other.

I think that’s actually a good thing, as one way to not notice the passage of time as a thing is to not pay that much attention to it. Sounds strange that doesn’t it. One of the more memorable things I picked up from Star Trek Next Generation and Cdr Data’s journey was the thing about “A watched pot never boils”. He does the scientific experiments on it and whatever he does, the test kettle always boils in exactly the same time. Except when he turns off his internal chronometer, is distracted (I think cuddling Spot!) and the kettle boils as a surprise.

Gosh that’s an odd one to start off the post with.

^^ I even ventured out to get the shopping tonight. Acquired 2 small Easter Eggs (there are still some left) as well. One is currently mysteriously disappearing. I grabbed a bunch of other stuff too and shouldn’t have to head out for over a week again.

I’m doing the work at home thing as well but one difference from last year is that whereas last year, I was getting out and about looking at Stuff, the only period I’ve done that this year is the Canada thing. Hopefully more of that later in the year. You get a lot more context about the kit, how it works, what it does that you weren’t expecting, when you see it in action. You don’t get that sat behind a desk.

It’ll be good to see the work people as well and see that they’re all coming through ok. One thing that’s going to be really tough is that the statistics say that at least a few of the people we all know won’t make it. Hopefully for me that’ll be zero and everyone I know will come through this ok. The only thing I can do to impact though is to not endanger them by being the source of the risk.

But enough of that, this was supposed to be more about things to look forwards to when we get to go out again.

Hopefully lots of places to be. For me, there are going to be the highlights of :

Bookbarn. This is a nice chilled out place with an absolute avalanche of books and a nice little coffee shop too. Even better visiting it with a friend and helping them carry away the books that you persuaded them to buy.

Cardiff. Here we have the Book Cave, the sweet shop and there’s also the Lego shop too … And you can get a nice chilled out wander over there too. Cardiff is a big hot spot though, so … maybe this one will be in a good while.

Bristol centre ? Not so thrilled about Bristol centre these days. One issue with the raising of the business rates is that the smaller curiosity shops closed and moved out. There’s less of interest around these days, although again it’s a nice little chilled out wander.

Heading out with friends. I know a few very special people and it’s great to catch up over a meal out and / or a movie.

Popcorn and a movie. I nearly caught a movie on the last few days that the cinemas were open but wasn’t feeling it. It’ll be good to get out to the movies again with a big bucket of popcorn salty enough to make your lips feel like they’re burning. And to see a great movie too. I don’t think I’ll care too much what I see, I’ll just be very happy seeing movies again.

Getting out in the fresh air again, maybe a long walk. I’m not getting much exercise at the moment and I’ll definitely feel that when I ask my legs to be doing stuff again.

I always look forwards to Comic Con every year. Hopefully we get one this year. The London and Birmingham venues are currently Nightingale hospitals.

The cricket too ! That’s in severe danger of not happening at all I think. The Lords days are long days but it’s great to chill out in that stadium watching the cricket in a quiet area away from the more dense areas of the crowd.

And lots of other places too. I’ve had Bristol’s Planetarium in my list of things to see for a number of years now. It’d be good to do some day runs into the Cotswolds too. Bristol Aquarium ? Portsmouth ? Perhaps.

Yep. Plenty of things to see out there.

I would sound a note of caution though …

When the restrictions are lifted, be a bit cautious still. I’m not really thinking virus there, I’m thinking attitudes. There will be a huge number of people out there who have a sense of immortality due to surviving. There will be the people who have got used to not being responsible. There will be the people who are just normally incredibly reckless.

You will see these people out there around you if you venture out at the moment. Better believe that when restrictions lift, these people will be out and about crowding without a care in the world. Hopefully it doesn’t lead to a resurgance in the virus but I’m not really thinking of that, I’m thinking more of accidents on the roads, general poor behaviour and huge crowds. General craziness on a level we haven’t seen before.

Personally, I get a bit wobbly when I’m in crowds anyway. I have a kind of Too Many People alarm that goes off and I’ll want to escape to peace and quiet for a while. I think the throngs that we’ll see will definitely trigger too many people anxiety feelings.

So … be careful, be wary, watch out for other people being silly but most of all :

Have fun. Be safe. Stay at home for now, dream of when we’re allowed to get out there again. Make plans ! I don’t think it matters that those plans won’t have a date they can happen yet. Just keep in mind what you’re going to be looking forward to after the isolation periods finish. And the more discipline we have now, the sooner we’ll be able to get out and about again.

Have a great evening everyone 🙂