"Not today, my good man; I'm feeling saucy!"

The cheapest used 3070s I can find online right now are $900~$1100 CDN (the cheaper of those are Kijiji pick-ups), and the new ones are hovering around $1400~$1600... And I just found a new MSI 3070 VENTUS 2X OC for $799. The same shop had a GIGABYTE 3070 GAMING OC for $769 (higher boost, one more fan, physically larger) as well, but it got sniped as I was adding it to my cart. $799 is a little high (this model started around $750) and I still have reservations about VRAM limitations; but times are strange, I totally got caught-up in the excitement, and when the 6800 street price turned-out to be $999 I got off that bandwagon... Sorry AMD, but I will eventually still buy your Ryzen 5 5600X (or equivalent) to properly support this new GPU.

My brother got me a Steam gift card for Christmas, so I snagged Boneworks, Half-Life: Alyx, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Streets of Rage 4 - all on sale. Finishing BotW first though, and distracted by THPS1+2 because it was on-sale on the Epic Games Store and I had one of those $14-off coupons :) Speaking of, decent free holiday game selection on there, but I already own most of them :(

Oldies

Turns-out all 1660-based video cards have been tough to find lately. Ended-up getting a 1660 Ti for $370 CDN from Best Buy to go into that i7-3820 Flight Sim computer; he says it runs great at 1080p on High :) The other 3820's onboard sound doesn't seem to be working properly - everything detects and output levels look correct, but only hear static - but that's fine because it's gonna be using an external audio interface anyway.

Dusted-off my Commodore 128 over the holidays - 1902 monitor still works great, but 1571 disk drive doesn't seem to be spinning. I plan to fix it, but decided to go with an SD2IEC as well; this one stuck with me because it's cheaper than all the others and appears to have a serial pass-through.

My partner imported the black Game Gear Micro for me, and tracked-down a new NES Classic Edition for a reasonable price... Kinda caught-up in it all now, and tempted to get the blue GG Micro, could maybe justify the SNES Classic Edition for StarFox 2, the quality and selection on the Genesis and TG16 minis are actually incredible, the Neo Geo Mini looks great even if they fucked-up the joystick and the HDMI output, and the Astro City mini... Oh man, that thing looks so neat... But now we're in the $1000 range (not including accessories and peripherals) for a bunch of easily-emulated collector shit that I own the originals of anyway 😅

Oh, and motion controls for BotW in Cemu using my phone over WiFi... Wild.

Two of Three

Got two new old computers from a studio that was decommissioning them; common parts between them are:

• i7-3820
• Cooler Master HSF (Hyper 212?)
• ASUS P9X79
• 4x4GB PC3-10600 (quad-channel)
• Cooler Master HAF (912?)
• LG M-DISC DVD burner

...Otherwise, they have decent 500~600W 80 PLUS Bronze PSUs. There's a third one coming, but they're still using it for a little while longer.

So I added a 500GB 7200RPM HDD to one, and I'm giving it to a friend who really wants to play Flight Simulator 2020 but only has an ancient Mac Book; I figure a 1660 SUPER will serve him well in there. Get a 27" 1080p monitor, toss-in an SSD, and then not really much more to do in terms of upgrades - and  it saves him, like, $500 up-front. Merry Christmas!

The other will likely go to that indie recording studio I mentioned a few posts ago, while the i7-930 will finally go to a friend with many hard drives who wants to build a 14-drive storage server :)

The fun part about these computers, however, was how poorly they were assembled! Upside-down PSUs! Horrible cable management - but there were zip-ties, so they tried and failed! An eight-pin PCIe power connector with only seven pins connected! A CPU mounted 180-degrees-off with both clamps latched and the huge HSF unit tightly screwed-into the motherboard! They couldn't figure-out why it wouldn't boot; I was surprised the CPU hadn't snapped!

You crazy son of a bitch, you did it.

Finally picked-up Breath of the Wild (for Wii U, and got all the DLC) and while I'm sure this isn't exactly a hot take, it's nice to see Miyamoto's original vision finally realised after over 30 years. It stands on the shoulders of a lot of games that came before - and they stood on the shoulders of previous Zelda games, themselves - but it gets it right in such a special way that it all feels so magically organic; classic Nintendo. Also tried-out Cemu and wow... Emulators have a come a long way since I started trying Game Boy games on my PC in the mid-'90s.

Took the copper HSF from my caseless 486DX-33 and installed it on my 486DX2-66 because why not. Also noted that my DX2-66 is an SX807 variant, so it has the SL low power enhancements but no write-back support. Neat. Also dusted-off my Fujitsu FKB4700, but put it away when I realised the key inputs would lock-up the PS/2 port if I tried to use the arrow keys with the right-Shift key... No good for the DOS games :(

As for RX 6800 v RTX 3070... Hrm. In terms of games, the former has a small advantage for now with SAM (and I guess Rage Mode?) but desperately needs to catch-up when it comes to raytracing and super-sampling - and I expect it will, so those are likely non-issues in the long run. What is actually interesting (because it's not upgradeable on the latter) is that the Radeon has twice the VRAM and Infinity Cache. Also curious to see how professional applications start to support AMD. Plenty remains to be seen, but I think Ryzen 5 5600X + Radeon RX 6800 may be the long-term solution.

the Video?

Update from previous post:  Have a feeling that the sweetspot for PC builds is about look something like: Ryzen 5 5600X + RX 6800 + PCIe 4.0 NVMe - that $80 US price-premium seems justified.

Wrapping-up the Porta-Pi build...Fried my 1GB Pi 4B after following the build guide's wiring instructions (crappy USB-C cable?), so I bought a 2GB model (same price as the 1GB model now) and it's running on a separate adapter from the video driver and amp; worked-out a stereo issue with the amp; got creative while manually mapping the six buttons; settled on lr-mame2003 as the main emulator w/fbneo for incompatible titles; had to buy a new crimping tool and soldering iron - both of mine were too big; and the non-removable top panel made working on this vertical unit kind of a pain... But it's pretty cool! Also discovered Cosmo Gang the Video thanks to this project, and I'm pretty happy about it :)

Quakespasm

Arcane Dimensions 1.80 is out and what they've done with Quake is incredible. Play it.

Hotshot Racing is still great fun.

Wrapped-up FarCry Primal, and while it feels a little more aimless than its predecessors, I think it may be my favourite in the series so far.

Porta-Pi build is coming along; just gotta glue some wood, solder the power switch, and build the controls; everything else is gravy.

3D printed drive rails for the Antec case weren't tall enough; need a few more mm for test print #2.

Have a feeling that the sweetspot for PC builds is about look something like: Ryzen 5 5600X + RTX 3070 + PCIe 4.0 NVMe

Nuts :(

So the many-harddrived-computer experiment stalled because I couldn't find all of the drive rails for the Antec Titan 550 case :(

Currently looks like:

• i7-930
• Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 (rev. 2.0)
• 6x2GB PC3-10666 (triple-channel)
• Radeon HD 5850
• 2x7200RPM 320GB HDDs (RAID 0)
• Corsair CX500

I have four 250GB HDDs ready to go for the RAID 10 array, but no way to securely mount them in that case :( After searching for spare parts online, had a bright idea and now my buddy's gonna be printing a set of these for me to try-out.

I did replace the 500GB HDD in my Xubuntu Core 2 Quad with two 160GB drives in RAID 0 though, so that was fun.

Premiere

Got a call from a friend on Saturday asking me to build him a video editing computer real quick; here's what I had by Sunday:

• Ryzen 9 3900X
• Gigabyte X570 UD
• 2x16GB PC4-25600 (dual channel)
• 500GB PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe M.2 (system drive)
• 512GB SATA III SSD (scratch/cache drive)
• 2x Blackmagic Design DeckLink Duo 2
• Seasonic SSR-650FM
• Fractal Design Meshify C

Threw-in my Radeon HD 5450, but recommended he look for an RTX 2060 SUPER down the road, and maybe another 32GB of RAM if he starts working in 8K.

What really got me was how friggin' fast Windows 10 installed on this thing! Like, it only took a few minutes! Also, setting ultra fast boot + Windows fast startup gets it going in a few seconds.

Also, AMD's Wraith Prism Cooler having RGB enabled by default is annoying... You have to manage another cable, take-up a USB header on the motherboard, and install Cooler Master software to turn it off 😒

Minor

New spare parts = minor update to secondary desktop:

• i7-950
• ASUS P6X58D Premium
• 3x4GB PC3-12800 (triple-channel)
• 2x ATi FirePro 3D V8800
• 64GB OCZ Vertex 2
• 500GB 7200RPM HDD
• Plextor PX-880SA
• Antec TP-650
• Lian Li PC-68

Upgrades to parents' desktop, too:

• i5-2500
• ASUS P8Z68V-LX
• 4GB+2x2GB PC3-12800 (dual-channel)
• Radeon HD 6950
• 128GB OCZ Vertex 4
• 1TB 7200RPM HDD
• Corsair TX650
• Lian Li PC-68

And a new basic recording studio computer for my friend?

• i7-930
• Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 (rev. 2.0)
• 6x2GB PC3-10666 (triple-channel)
• Radeon HD 5450

...Except that Gigabyte motherboard supports up to 14 hard drives, and I have a bunch of the spinning kind lying around. I also have a pretty big case just sitting there, empty. Maybe a 6Gb/s RAID0 system drive and a 3Gb/s RAID10 data drive? Just for fun? I mean, why not, right?

Also, finished Hexen II and man, that game is all kinds of rough. Need to talk more about that series some time soon; my memories were brought into question after recently playing through the first three games and their expansion packs... Still have to finish-up Portal of Peaevus and Heretic II though. Also, GRAVEN.

Toasty!

The Radeon 8500 in the 9x build just kinda died... Fan spins, but that's it. Replaced it with an 8500LE, but then realised that fan had seized... At which point I looked wistfully at my overheated 9700 Pro. So, in went the GeForce 3 Ti 200... And I quickly noticed that quality control on NVIDIA's 9x drivers seems a little lax; reproducible NVIDIA control panel crashes, a BSOD, a seemingly broken uninstaller... Got it all going eventually, and ran hardware diagnostics just to make sure it wasn't something else causing the instability. Also, the sound effects + CD Audio starting working together in Hexen II for no apparent reason.

Otherwise, I recently completed a project that involved expanding, upgrading, and re-provisioning a Linux-based renderfarm that now collectively sports over 2.7TB of RAM, just over 800 CPU threads turboing up to 3.7GHz, and 84 GPUs delivering over 760 TFLOPs in a single 21-node rack. It gets noisy sometimes... And also kinda warm.

Oh! Hotshot Racing is rad, and I'm really enjoying it!

3114

So going all-SATA on the DFI NFII Ultra Infinity was a fun exercise; finding the correct Silicon Image 3114 controller drivers and getting them onto a floppy disk took a couple of tries - needed the "SATALink" variant 😒 After that, however, Windows XP SP3 was good to go, and all of a sudden I had no more computers to build. Put fresh batteries in all of them, and now it's time to take stock of what's left; see what's worth keeping, what's destined for the e-waste station, what I can give away and what I hope to get a few bucks for.

Anyway, I installed Hexen II and Portal of Praevus on the 98 SE computer and... Yeesh. It's hooked-up to an old 1680x1050 LCD, and the closest video mode the game wanted to support was 1280x960... Which that Pentium II cannot handle on its own. To get GL Hexen running, I had to remove the game's custom opengl32.dll, and then things were pretty great on the Radeon 8500... Except there was no sound; just CD audio. Manually re-installing the sound card drivers via Device Manager got sound working, but not at the same time as the CD audio, so... That's weird? Anyway, the same visual glitches present on the Steam release are still there on era-correct hardware so I guess I'll just play it on steam until I get to the Mission Pack? Ergh.

XP on an XP

Built the XP computer; haven't installed Windows yet. Put it all in a nice, compact Antec mid-tower with a 480W Antec PSU. Speaking of cases, I found-out that the case I put the Pentium II in is apparently pretty sought-after, so that's kinda neat.

Between stalling on DOOM VFR and waiting for "DOOM Eternal – The Ancient Gods, Part One", I idly played through the first three episodes of the original DOOM in Chocolate DOOM, and then revisited Heretic and Hexen when I finished configuring the DOS computer; and realised I never played Deathknights of the Dark Citadel, so I grabbed the latest GZDOOM and it turns-out that game if frickin' difficult! Finished a playthrough as the cleric though, and it was kinda great; like, actual puzzle solving and not just a key/fake-wall hunt. Well-into episode two of Heretic now, and likely going through Hexen again as well; and then Hexen II and Portal of Praevus on the 98 SE computer before finally getting back to Heretic II; I never finished the former two, and loved the latter back when it was first released :)

Otherwise, Need for Speed: The Run was on-sale for $10, so I ploughed throw that pretty quickly. It's kinda rough in every possible way, but still enjoyable. Cool cars, nice-enough graphics, and some truly stand-out moments (the controlled avalanche race, the tractor traffic, and the subway tunnels) couldn't save driving mechanics that are somehow simultaneously 'realistically' clunky and unbelievably ridiculous, an unpolished rewind system that would drop me into inescapable crashes, awful cutscenes, and painful dialogue though.

Control: AWE is out, I've started it, it's surreal, and I'm in; let's go...

Second Edition

Wrapped-up the DOS build and got going with the Windows 98 SE build - the latter looks like this:

• 300MHz Pentium II
• Intel AL440LX
• 192MB SDRAM
• 128MB AGP Radeon 8500
• 16MB PCI Voodoo Banshee
• Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX
• 6.4GB HDD
• DVD-ROM

There're some bottlenecks and concessions in there - e.g. AGP 4X card on an AGP 2X board, 66MHz FSB - but aside from Windows 98 being painfully slow and unsupportive until you get all your drivers installed, it went pretty smoothly. I could've built it around a 500Mhz K6-2 or a Socket A platform, but this PII still holds its own and has a special place in my heart :) Opted for no NIC since that thing really shouldn't be going online anyway, the second GPU is just for Glide support, I don't think I ever had the breakout box for the Audigy... Both this and the DOS computer are being built from whatever I've kept over the past 30 years; not investing any money in these projects.

Getting back to the DOS computer, I replaced the SB16-controlled CD-ROM with a regular IDE DVD-ROM and it works just fine (can read data DVDs in DOS!), set-up a three-button Logitech serial mouse (had to replace the ball), and installed Windows 3.1; with the mach32 and SB16 drivers installed and configured, it looks and sounds great - 1024x768, 65K colours, video playback acceleration, a decent audio editing suite! Also tracked-down a copy of UNARJ and installed some more games I had on old floppies. All of the new drivers ate-up a little too much RAM, but EMM386 cleared that up. Speaking of RAM, I wouldn't mind upgrading it to 64MB and adding a secondary cache (it supports up to 256KB), but there's no real need so I think this one's done.

Next up is the Windows XP computer - Currently looking like:

• Athlon XP 3200+
• DFI NFII Ultra Infinity
• 2GB DDR400 (dual channel)
• 512MB Radeon X1950 Pro
• Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

...Really just need to decide on a PSU and a case. Also have an Athlon 64 3500+, but that 3200+ is another part I learned a lot on and one was top-of-the line at the time so yeah, nostalgia :)

Getting Ready...

In anticipation of the AWE DLC for Control, I played through The Foundation DLC, both DLCs for Alan Wake, and Alan Wake's American Nightmare... All four experiences are worth it for their contributions to the narrative; The Signal's kind of a mess in terms of gameplay, but The Writer feels more balanced; American Nightmare handles traditional action better than its predecessor, but in doing so kinda misses the point of the original game. Regardless, excited for AWE!

Also decided to revisit Far Cry with all the sales on 5 and New Dawn alongside the announcement of 6. So Blood Dragon kinda sucks; it felt stilted and boring, was only barely funny, and I'm glad it was only four hours long. Far Cry: Primal, however, is right up my alley; very much enjoying that one. I think 4 did the spiritual journey missions better, but Primal feels like the better overall game.

Oh, also finally tried Steep a little while ago; not what I expected, but really interesting. Will get back to it.

Finally, my brother got that Mario Lego set for me, and it actually kinda works! Bluetooth functionality alongside the app is slick, and gameplay can get surprisingly challenging as a sort of score-attack experience. Doubt I'll be getting the expansion sets, but this is a really neat experiment.

Recent Recommendations

Friends asking for build recommendations lately, so...

Budget gaming for ~$800 CDN:

• Ryzen 3 3100 
• Gigabyte B550M DS3H
• 2 x 8 GB DDR4-3200
• ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 256GB M.2 NVME SSD
• 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM HDD
• GTX 1650 SUPER
• be quiet! System Power U9 400W

Budget VM server for ~$575 CDN:

• Ryzen 5 2600
• ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0
• 2 x 16 GB DDR4-3200
• ADATA Ultimate SU800 256 GB 2.5" SSD
• be quiet! System Power U9 400W

...I figure they can do whatever they want for cases, and I imagine the VM host is gonna have an interesting storage setup regardless of what they start with.

27 Years Young

Got bored and dug-out my old Digital Equipment Corporation DECpc LPx:

• Intel 486DX2-66
• 16MB of RAM
• 2MB ATi Graphics Ultra Pro (VLB)
• Sound Blaster 16
• 365MB HDD

Went for a clean installation of MS-DOS 6.22 and a copy of PKZIP, and I've just sort of been installing old games and playing with drivers... And it's been kind of wonderful. All of it was much simpler than I remember things being back then, but I guess I did end-up making a career of it since. I have 250MB and 1.3GB HDDs to test-out in there as well, but no rush. Had to replace the 3.5" FDD (it wasn't reading disks), and I disconnected the 5.25" FDD to connect the CD-ROM drive that came with the SB16; it detects properly, but doesn't spin :( Getting things from the Internet onto floppies has been a bit of an adventure, but well worth it in these mostly-housebound times :)

Also, Ion Fury is really good.

That's better...

Okay, so DOOM Eternal gets much better as you level-up and the story fleshes-out, which makes it feel like maybe id left some kind of NewGame+ mode enabled :\ The punishing aspects of the gameplay feel much more balanced once you finish the Super Gore Nest, the ridiculous aspects of the presentation start to feel a lot more like the 2016 game as you make your way through the ARC complex, and the story makes a whole hell of a lot more sense by the time you start Mars Core. I'm not quite finished the campaign yet, but I'm really quite happy with it now.

Finished Resident Evil 4; 80% hit ratio, 961 enemies killed, 0 deaths, 13:35'07" clear time; still don't like it. Tried the Resident Evil 2 R.P.D. Demo... Meh. Started Resident Evil 7, and... Wow! About an hour-and-a-half in, and it's phenomenal! Please don't blow it, Capcom... Please?

You've already hurt me plenty... Please stop.

DOOM Eternal on sale for $34 CDN - no-brainer. Bought it... Wait, what the hell!? Why am I playing a twitchy score-attack masocore precision splatformer Souls game with a techno soundtrack? Why are there Saturday-morning-cartoon sound effects? Why am I running my assault from a space castle with a 486 and a record player? Why is the in-game newsradio referring to me as "The Doomguy"? Way to jump the shark, id... It's not exactly bad; I seem to get each encounter by the second try, but this rollercoaster of a difficulty curve really (ironically?) breaks the flow of the whole experience. I feel like the 2016 game got it right by keeping Arcade Mode separate from the main campaign; they've bled together a little too much in Eternal :\

Also, Resident Evil 4 isn't fun. The narrative is bad, the dialogue is bad, the acting is bad, the dynamic difficulty is insulting, the checkpoints are often pretty close to save-points anyway... I mean, I get it; this game revitalised not only the franchise, but also the survival-horror genre - and even kicked-off the renaissance of the over-the-shoulder third-person shooter. That's all cool, but I couldn't get into it back when it was first released, and after giving it an honest shot now, it just feels silly and clunky and somehow like even more of a slog than the original Resident Evil - despite being significantly streamlined and way more forgiving. There're some really intense moments when everything locks-in and it's a lot of fun, and there're also a few set-pieces that are absolutely wonderful in their silliness... But everything in between is just kind of annoying. This game was only marginally better than its forerunners, and was so quickly surpassed that it feels like even more of a curiosity than the first Resident Evil. I think it's okay to revere and even love this game, but stop holding it up as some timeless masterpiece best-game-ever thing... It's barely in the top five of 2005.

Not as bad as I'd feared...

So it looks like they finally listened to the fans, and Need for Speed Heat turned-out kinda great. 60FPS, pretty stable, offline play, and the story and characters were suitably ridiculous while still being fun. I even gave the Forza Horizon 4 demo a shot before making my decision to go with Heat, but the NFS games are still just more exciting. I got what I wanted out of it in ~45 hours by starting with the '65 Mustang, upgrading to an Exige, and then pretty much winning everything with that until I could max-out an F40. From there, I settled on a garage with a '65 Mustang, a '71 GT R, an '87 GNX, an '04 STi, a '13 Z06, and the aforementioned F40. Otherwise, the drift events didn't feel great, escaping pursuits became a bit of a chore, the High Heat races were super-intense, and the black market campaign was genuinely challenging. Well-worth the $40 I paid on Origin for the Standard Edition... Even though the Deluxe Edition was released on Steam for $35 not long after :\

Anyway, moving on, Control was fantastic; I think it's the first time I've made an effort to actually consume every bit of material in a game since I played a BioShock title - I even avoided using fast-travel for the most part because I didn't want to miss a single thing. Yeah, it's gorgeous and visceral wish-fulfillment to take charge of the situation, fly around, and blast enemies in creative ways; but it's also such a rich and intriguing world to read about, and I still want more - cannot wait for the next DLC. Quantum Break was good, but this feels like a return-to-form for Remedy.

For a change of pace after that, I revisited Resident Evil HD Remaster. Full disclosure: The only RE game I'd ever completed was Resident Evil 2: Platinum on Windows 9x, and I loved it. I played Nemesis and Code Veronica on Dreamcast, and 4 on PS2... And I never finished any of them. They were interesting and exciting, but the commitment required by the limited saves and ammo just put such a barrier in place for me that I never really sat down and dedicated even a weekend to getting into them. I remember when the first game arrived on PS1, I was floored and wanted to play it so bad but didn't have a PS1... Then I found-out about the PC port; but I'd understood that it required a 3dfx card, and all I had was an ATi RAGE Pro. It wasn't until years later that I learned there was Direct3D support :\ In the meantime, I got a Saturn and almost picked-up the Director's Cut, but it was still pretty expensive and I balked at the price. I finally picked-up the GameCube remake, but again neglected to dedicate the time to getting into it... And did the same when the HD Remaster was first released. This time, however, I told myself I was going to get past my personal hang-ups (and this whole pandemic has been keeping us at home more than usual, so that helped) and here we are: I got the best ending with Jill in about nine hours, but I don't think I'll be checking-out Chris' campaign or any of the other modes. It hasn't aged all that well since 2002; I can see how incredible it really was in 1996, as well as how slick it would've been to revisit six years later... 19 years later though? Oof. It's mostly the loading screens and the sharks that hold it back - but aside from its significance as an influential touchstone and as a time-capsule, it's more akin to the original Need for Speed showing us where we came from rather than standing-up as a timeless classic.

Next-up for me is either gonna be Dead Space 2, Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition, or Resident Evil VII - though I'm kinda holding-out for that that last one to support VR on PC :\

Which one's the Neediest?

Levelling all the way up and assaulting Merv Tower in River City Ransom: Underground only to get one-hit knocked-out by the jet with no checkpoint kinda ground the game to a halt for me. Will get back to it, but... Ugh.

On that note, Alice: Madness Returns is such a slog... There're moments of brilliance in the visuals, gameplay, and narrative, but it all just feels so unnecessarily padded-out.

RetroPie was released for Raspberry Pi 4 though, so that seemed like a good excuse to jump into Bare Knuckle III on Genesis Plus GX; I own Streets of Rage 3, and it's just kinda awful... The Japaense release is so, SO much better! What were you thinking, SOA :(

Anyway, then the Epic Games Store coupon sale hit, and I snagged Control (haven't tried it yet), Tetris Effect (finished it on Beginner in VR), and Metro Exodus - Gold Edition... Considering Trackmania Turbo next. Tetris Effect is a really, really good Tetris game - Tetsuya Mizuguchi's trademark design and the addition of the Zone mechanic... Not the revelation I was led to believe, but probably the best Tetris game I've played since Tetris DS.

Also, with the bigger SSD, I decided to bring back some casual racing games - namely Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed Rivals. This led me down an NFS rabbit-hole to figure-out which NFS game really is the best to focus on today... Here's how I like to break it down:

The original series; none have aged particularly well, but they were all great upon release:

• The Need for Speed (1994)
• Need for Speed II (1997)
• Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (1998)
• Need for Speed: High Stakes (1999)
• Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed (2000)
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002)

Underground kinda totally re-invented things, and this seems to be the nostalgia that most people cling to:

• Need for Speed: Underground (2003)
• Need for Speed: Underground 2 (2004)
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005)
• Need for Speed: Carbon (2006)
• Need for Speed: Undercover (2008)

Somewhere in there, they kicked-off this track-day approach, and it was solid:

• Need for Speed: ProStreet (2007)
• Need for Speed: Shift (2009)
• Shift 2: Unleashed (2011)

Then Criterion handled this transitional era that really seems to have divided the fanbase, and it's also where I stopped playing:

• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010)
• Need for Speed: The Run (2011)
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012)
• Need for Speed Rivals (2013)

...Not really touching V-Rally and Nitro, or the online, portable, and mobile releases, but they're generally fine.

Some context and thoughts then: I didn't spend much time with Carbon, haven't played Undercover, didn't get very deep into ProStreet or Shift, didn't touch The Run even though its approach is intriguing, I hear the 2015 reboot and Payback are a love-or-hate proposition among fans, and Heat is supposedly a welcome return to form.

Personally, I loved the 3DO and DOS versions of the first-ever game when they were released, thought Underground was a revelation, and played the hell out of Most Wanted (2005)... And I don't really want to revisit any of them.

Hot Pursuit (2010) feels like the best version of the original 3DO/DOS game out there, and I suspect that's why it's so revered among die-hard fans. Most Wanted (2012) was fine, but just kinda felt like Burnout to me.

...And that's where Rivals comes into focus; it's Criterion handing-off the franchise to Ghost, everyone getting familiar with the eighth generation of video game consoles, and just kinda laying-down a foundation. I can't personally say if the three subsequent games did well on top of that foundation - the reviews and videos don't suggest any great advancements - but I also don't really care because I'm still having a great time with Rivals.

I've read complaints about a lack of content and direction, but it's a well thought-out and varied sandbox with a clever and minimal narrative... It's all a little melodramatic, but don't forget that this is a Need for Speed game ;) Other complaints include how buggy it is - I've gotten caught in the geometry once, and been stuck between menus twice, but it never really bothered me; I just restarted the game and jumped right back in. Even when my session inexplicably migrates hosts mid-event, it does a solid job of picking-up right where we left-off. The sillier complaints I read were that cops were too aggressive and people hated losing unbanked SpeedPoints when busted... I assume these people don't actually like video games. I, for one, love the excitement and challenge that tangible penalties bring. There isn't a huge amount of content, no, and I don't care for the online aspects of it; but I also don't plan on playing this forever - it's already been out for seven years and three more games in the series have been released.

Rivals looks better than everything before it, and just about as good as anything since; it has a satisfying damage model, a gorgeous weather system, and a great day/night cycle. As for controls, Raycevick put it best when describing what stood-out about Most Wanted (2005): "The feeling of being in total control... But just barely." - I feel that in Rivals as well; it drives like a Need for Speed game should.

Expandability

I bought an M-Audio FireWire Solo with an employee discount back in... 2006, maybe? Earlier? Anyway, it did the trick but driver support was always kinda hit-and-miss. I ended-up trading it years later; to a friend who was going to use it to extend his existing interface, so no drivers required. In return, I got a TASCAM US-122MKII - not really an upgrade or a downgrade at the end of the day, but its drivers still worked so I was happy. It started randomly making some really weird noises lately though, so I figured I'd just bite the bullet and buy something proper instead of wondering if it was physically failing, its Windows 8 drivers just didn't work well with newer versions of Windows 10, or something else was up... 14 years or so is a good return on my initial investment, right? So my new Audient iD14 arrived last week (found a 5% discount code and free shipping), and it's very nice. My not-great M-Audio AV42 monitors, my also-not-great Hosa Pro HPR-X2 speaker cables, and my interesting-but-not-great M-Audio Nova mic are not doing the iD14 any favours; but it's really helping them out and is a great centrepiece to build around in the future.

I also opted for a 512GB ADATA SU800 to replace my 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 'cause it was under $100 CDN and shipped for free. Windows 10 2004 went on there, along with all of the games that were installed on my spinning drives - Anthem is ever-so-slightly better now :)

Not quite last though, yeah?

Wrapped-up Metro: Last Light, and really happy with it... Got the bad endings in each of the first two games, likely won't be playing Redux any time soon, waiting for a sale on Exodus, and very curious about ARKTIKA.1 - which reminds me, I'd forgotten all about Obduction, and so I've added that to my wishlist.

Moved-on to Alice: Madness Returns, and it's pretty rough. Very high-concept; a study in style over substance - as seen in the awful jumping mechanics, repetitive and drawn-out combat, inconsistent storytelling, some downright ugly levels, and inexplicably bad performance despite being capped at 30fps. It's still interesting enough to keep me coming back and progressing in small doses, but also had me looking for something else to break-up the monotony. Then Streets of Rage 4 was released, and I remembered that I'd never finished River City Ransom: Underground... Which it turns-out is more akin to Alice than I remembered - I get that they're going for oldschool-inspired design, but the difficulty seems to spike pretty suddenly when you reach level 10, and figuring-out what you're supposed to do (and when) is a little obtuse. Ultimately having fun with both, but yeah, plenty of unnecessary frustrations.

WMRkitka tho?

Shadow of the Tomb Raider was fine - good, even. It mostly just kinda made me want to finally bite the bullet and buy a PS4 for Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy though... Or at least renewed my interest in PlayStation Now :) Anyway, I played through the Definitive Edition, so it was long and some of the DLC tombs - while often breathtaking in terms of both graphics and gameplay - felt pretty stilted in a lot of their jumping, climbing, and puzzle mechanics. Had plenty of fun though, and it was well worth the ~$27 CDN I paid for it.

Bought the new release of DOOM 64 because I never completed my N64 copy and I played the hell out of DOOM 64 EX, so ~$6 to support Sam Villarreal and get a few new levels was a no-brainer.

Next was revisiting the original release of Metro 2033... Way jankier than I remembered, but still playable enough. Finished-up the final half of the game that I'd put on hold a few years ago, then jumped right in to Last Light. What a difference! Burning through it over the past few days, almost done, and tempted to get Metro 2033: Redux... But likely gonna get to Exodus first.

Masterclass

Finished Dishonored 2, Clean Hands as Emily, and wow. The Dunwall levels are kinda meh, but those bookends remind us how this sequel is a leap forward for the series without forgetting its roots. Exploring Karnca is gorgeous but also more of the same, then the Addermire Institute is a great kind of creepy with a fun little twist, and THEN we get to Jindosh's house and holy shit - steampunk Portal(!) is just the best thing ever, especially given how many ways you can approach that level... The genre just peaked right there. The Conservatory was fun to look at, but I wanted it to go further with how it explored the concept of the Void; and then the Dust District introduced some very nifty mechanics in terms of both how the dust storms affect the core gameplay and how there're so many different solutions for getting past the factions - I especially liked the word puzzle that was solvable in real life with actual logic :) A Crack in the Slab threw another curveball that was one of the best implementations of time-travel/light-and-dark world mechanics I can recall... Ever. The Grand Palace sported some pretty great architecture but kinda disappointed after the previous missions, and then we're back to Dunwall. Good ride. AAA game right there. Good story, and whatever bugs and design issues that were present at launch aren't present anymore - quick load times, quicksaves, new game+, stable... Looking forward to Death of the Outsider, but taking a break first.

Up next is finishing DOOM VFR and then Duck Season in VR; Shadow of the Tomb Raider otherwise. Also grabbed Destiny 2 since it's gone free-to-play and I still find myself hopping back into Anthem... So far, I don't really see the unique appeal of this core gameplay loop, but I've only just begun.

Anyway, the expensive and kinda ridiculous Zalman CNPS12X that's been cooling the CPU in my main desktop was contracting in the cold Canadian winter, the centre fan was starting to make contact with the fins, and the result was a sort-of loud grinding/clicking noise... It's fine, but it was also getting kind of really annoying waiting for my computer to literally warm-up enough for the fins to pull away from the fan. Since there's no obvious way to disassemble and re-seat the centre fan, I said fuck it and bought an Intel BXTS13A - the stock, first-party cooler for the 3930K that was *not* included in the original SKU, and cheekily sports a blue LED :) It was around $35, brand new on Amazon Prime - no more grinding, so much easier to work with, and cools just about as well as Zalman's metal softball without being significantly louder next to all the other fans in my case. Only thing left to maybe do with this computer is get an M.2 PCIe 3 adapter and an 500GB NVMe drive - then I think it's finally done, because bottlenecks :(

"Support"

So I bought Anthem for like, $10 - wanted to see what all the fuss was about since the trailers looked so incredibly rad, but the press seemed to be so very bad. I'm not really one for any kind of multiplayer, but figured the sale price was worth it just to check things out.

First takeaway: Flying around the tutorial level was worth the money all on it's own! The trailers did not lie! BioWare really made the experience of jumping off a mountain, free-falling for a few seconds before firing your jetpack to fly through a canyon, and then diving underwater to explore a network of sunken tunnels leading to ancient ruins - all over the course of ten seconds - so viscerally satisfying that it was worth building a game around. As much as I prefer a story-driven single-player campaign with a big helping of world exploration, it turns-out that Anthem's third-person four-player online raid shooter is also an impressively well-written and well-acted story-driven campaign that takes place over a reasonably large map and can be played almost entirely solo! 25~30 hours later and I'm sitting at level 20 after having saved the world (after completing a bunch of side-quests) and I only had to tackle one multiplayer Stronghold and one quick multiplayer Freeplay session to advance the story. It was kind of annoying that the game kept encouraging me to play with other people, but it was only a mild inconvenience. I also tried a Cataclysm and a Storm Gate just to see what I was missing, and they were fine; still not into multiplayer though.

I hear the game was buggy at launch, the loot was terrible, and the load-times were excruciating - but that all seems to have been remedied at this point. I only experienced two crashes and didn't lose anything; loot kept me consistently competitive and I even ended-up with a couple of Masterwork and Legendary weapons that made life much easier; and load-times were long but bearable from my spinning HDD - felt about the same as DOOM (2016). I did consider buying a bigger SSD for Anthem, just to see how much it would help load-times though; performance too, since streaming the world seemed to have my frame-rates dipping from 60FPS down to 45FPS... But then I kinda finished the game and moved-on to others. I would come back for some more world-building though! Also, did Fort Tarsis remind anyone else of Deus Ex: Invisible War? I actually liked Invisible War... Maybe I'm broken.

Before moving-on to the other games I've been playing, I'd like to talk about my recent EA support experience. For context, I created a Hotmail address in the '90s with a stupid username because I was a teenager, and I still have it. I graduated to a non-Hotmail address maybe a few years later, and used that one to create my Steam and Origin accounts - the latter also with a silly username. I've been pretty settled on Gmail for a while now, but I keep the other ones going for back-ups, old accounts, and the like.

Anyway, I decided that with Anthem being multiplayer and all, I wanted to change that silly Origin username. My Origin account was hacked and sold a few years ago - I don't think two-factor authentication was an option when I signed-up, and I neglected to enable it after EA recovered my account... My bad. Trying to edit any account details, however, sent a verification e-mail to my old e-mail address, which it turns-out had been deleted due to inactivity and the provider was unable to recover the address - it looks like they no longer offer the domain I was using... Cool. Again, my bad. So I contacted EA and asked them to change the e-mail address associated with my account to my Gmail address. They said they couldn't because an account already existed for that e-mail address. Turns-out I created a separate Origin account for an XBOX 360 game some 15 years ago. Third strike against me; way to go, me. For convenience, I asked them to change it to my Hotmail address so that I could just verify the codes and clear-up all the confusion myself, but it turns-out someone else had associated that Hotmail address with a PSN account that isn't mine. Great. The best part about all of this is that the EA support chat was only working in Internet Explorer. Not sure what that was about, but it works in Chrome now even though I changed nothing on my end.

Regardless, I reclaimed both the Gmail- and Hotmail-associated Origin accounts by using the verification codes - proving that they work with these addresses - and had EA change the main account over to my old University alumni e-mail address for the time being... But the alumni address wasn't receiving the verification codes either. Neither the university's nor the alumni office's support team could help me. It's hosted by Gmail. EA told me to take it up with Gmail. Finally, after nearly four weeks of e-mails directing me to chats and chats directing me to e-mails that were not monitored (EA support actually sent me an e-mail saying nobody was checking the address I was directed to), one support technician offering to make the changes for me instead of fixing the verification issue, and EA asking me for even more e-mail addresses (five over four providers isn't enough!?), I got my main Gmail address associated with my main Origin account. The process up to this point was so ridiculous... And it's still not receiving the verification codes; the same address that was receiving them when it was associated with my other Origin account. It really looks like the primary e-mail address field of the Origin account is the problem, but EA refuses to acknowledge that. Coool! Anyway, we added the alumni address as the secondary address and it's suddenly receiving the verification codes it couldn't before! Still can't enable two-factor authentication because it only e-mails the primary e-mail address, but at least I can change my settings all by myself again!

*phew*

I finally got around to Quantum Break, and it's pretty and well-made and fun and the story's cool and one scene toward the end kind of almost ruins all of it and the interactive movie thing was alright even thought didn't really elevate the experience. By the time the game was over, I was satisfied but just didn't feel as engaged as I did with Max Payne or Alan Wake.

Wolfenstein II was fun, but I lost interest once I finished the main campaign; no huntung for collectibles, no Uberkommandant missions, no secret ending, no DLC... Maybe one day, but yeah, I think I might be over that franchise. The story was pretty fucking insane though, and it kinda worked. Still, not touching Youngblood or Cyberpilot any time soon.

Starting Dishonored 2; immediately more engaging, though going for a no-kill run right off the bat does have me save-scumming a little ;)

Also, GTX card prices seem to have dropped and a 1660 Super is hanging-around $380 CDN after taxes... So I'm still pretty happy with my $260 1070 :)

Sweet Spot

Got to play around with two GTX 970s in SLI, and it got me refocused on upgrading my GTX 780. Long story short, I ended-up getting a used MSI GTX 1070 GAMING X for $260 CDN.

The new video card requires the MSI Gaming App to take full advantage of its advertised cooling, RGB, and overclocking controls; but that app hasn't worked properly since Windows 10 1809 - and MSI has no intention of updating it, according to their forum moderator. I can recreate the OC and cooling settings better in MSI Afterburner though, so we're good there.

Anyway, $260... That's ~$230 + tax here in Ontario. The 1070 is a few years old now, so anything cheaper on the used market is even older and pretty firmly in the bad-long-term-investment category. The 780 I replaced is going for $150~$200, the newer 970 performs about the same and is going for about the same, and even when either's paired in SLI neither matches the 1070 - so they're out. The 980 Ti is around the same price as the 1070 but performance looks comparable, so I'm not seeing any reason to go back another generation. The next step up in the used market is the 1070 Ti, and it's going for anywhere from $60 to $240 more than the 1070... For a ~25% performance increase it's not bad, but not a great deal; especially since the 1070 still really holds its own with today's games as well as VR, and won't be having any issues with 1080p for years to come. Don't hesitate to grab a 1070 Ti if you find one closer to $300, but it's all extra at that point.

So what about comparably-priced new video cards? GTX 1650 SUPER or Radeon RX 570... Everything there is either a budget part or already old, and all are significantly slower than the used 1070.

Comparably-performing new video cards? GTX 1660 Ti or Radeon 5600 XT for $450 after tax... Good cards, but they're not going to age well for the $190 price premium.

Marginal upgrade on new cards? RTX 2060 for $565 after tax... That's an additional $300 to add low-end RTX support and lose 2GB of VRAM!? I'm not sold, and now that we're well over twice the price of the 1070, I think I'm done.

So it looks like spending under $300 CDN for a 1070 is the way to go if you're upgrading from the low-end (or from 2013, like I was) and want to save at least a few hundred dollars.

It's a flower.

Pi Stuff:

Started tinkering with a 4GB Class 4 microSD card I had lying around... Upgrading to a $4 16GB Class 10 card from the dollar store was a good idea; a 64GB Kingston Canvas React for $16 seems to be the sweet-spot though.

RetroPie isn't out for the Raspberry Pi 4 yet, so I've been playing around with Raspbian Lite, Xfce 4, and RetroArch in the meantime. Pretty decent results, but not exactly comprehensive and not quite full-speed... Switching to Lakka seems to have fixed the performance issues though! I think I'm ready to actually build the PortaPi :)

VR Stuff:

Psychonauts and Moss are the best. The Lab's hilarious and has so much to explore. DOOM is slick and intense. Prey's pretty interesting. All four Serious Sam games work better than expected. The Talos Principle is a great fit for VR. Cloudlands is the best minigolf title I've found so far. SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics' VR mode is a silly-but-welcome addition. Have yet to try Hellblade. Mountain and Q.U.B.E. only support Oculus DK1 despite having the VR tag in Steam, and Transmissions: Element 120 doesn't seem to support VR at all - despite the same tag :\ Dream Golf VR was challenging, but not in a good way. Premium Bowling was decidedly not premium. Rec Room was terrifying in all the wrong ways.