Got a little scared for a minute there...

DD-WRT on the EA6300V1 because OpenWrt suggests that they're effectively a non-option and I can't find any info on how Tomato compares to the closed-source aspects of DD-WRT. It's been years since I've really messed around with any of them, and I'm not quite up-to-speed on all of this - so I went with what seemed like the safest bet. Ended-up following this guide, but with the latest DD-WRT as the final step - pretty convoluted, but it worked! I couldn't get 5GHz speeds over 400Mbps at first, but it just turned-out that DD-WRT's "Auto" channel setting is maybe not good. Did a site survey, moved things over to a less-crowded part of the spectrum, and now everything looks happy. Next test is with the Archer T9E to see if an EA6300V1 really can reach AC1600 speeds.

Checked-out another thrift store today, found a Sony BDP-S1700, a DIR-868L, another DIR-822, and an Acer tower with a Core 2 Quad, 3GB of RAM, and a GTX 650... The tower was the most expensive item at $15 CDN. Neat projects, but I left them for someone else.

Because I'm bored...

Archer A7

• AC1750
• 3 x 5 dBi
• 28 dBm
• USB 2.0
• Single-Core

DIR-859

• AC1750
• 3 x 2 dBi
• 20 dBm
• No USB
• Single-Core

 EA6400

• AC1600
• 2 x 4 dBi + 3 x 5 dBi (internal)
• 24 dBm
• USB 3.0
• Dual-Core

Unless I'm misunderstanding how my devices are reporting link speeds, I don't think I have anything that really takes advantage of the 300~450Mbps or 1300Mbps Wi-Fi speeds.

Found-out that while USB 3.0 seems to make a significant difference in NAS performance, the only stock options are SMB 1.0 or FTP - neither of which is particularly secure.

I have no idea if the dual-core BCM4708 in the EA6400 performs any better than the single-core QCA9563 in the other two.

I'm not super-familiar with antennas, but it looks like the DIR-859 would be best for an open area with no obstructions, the EA6400 is more directional but also has more antennas and beamforming, and the Archer A7 is a bit of a brute-force approach.

So of the two places I'm deploying to, I think it makes sense to have the Archer A7 in the larger home with the most obstructions, and then the EA6400 in the smaller open area where more devices will be accessing it at once.

Finally, install DD-WRT on the EA6300V1 (no OpenWrt because Broadcom, apparently) to effectively make it another EA6400, and there's my backup. Test the DIR-859 in the larger/obstructed space for science before giving it away, and... Yeah, that's the ticket!

Flannel Zebra Jammies

Two more:

D-Link DIR-859: AC1750, Gigabit Ethernet, no USB ($7)

Linksys EA6400: AC1600, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 ($7)

...Replaced my EA6300 with the EA6400 because why not, and gonna keep the DIR-859 as a backup. Giving away the EA6300, DIR-822, two EA3500s, and a Dynex DX-NRUTER.

Oh! Turns-out the EA6300 I've had for almost a decade is an EA6300V1, which is an EA6400 with EA6300 firmware. Huh.

Pretty-much wrapped-up Forza Horizon 4 and Mortal Kombat 11 - completing a few odds-and-ends in each (LEGO® Speed Champions and the new Krypt are really fun) but the big takeaway is that I am now officially spoiled by pseudo-HDR and VRR up to 240Hz.

Also tried Sonic Lost World again - on Windows this time, and it's kinda pretty good.

Mildly Disappointed

One dead pixel and one dead green subpixel on the AW2721D; Dell won't authorise an exchange for less than six, but at least they're not really noticeable... Let's see if any more crop-up over the next three years. The bleed from the local dimming zones is, however, quite noticeable unless you tweak application brightness along with the display's "Dark Stabilizer" and "Variable Backlight" settings. Despite all of that though, it's a very impressive monitor for the price. I've put a Dell U2311H next to it, and it's night-and-day.

The AC1750 Archer A7 and the AC1900 Archer T9E occasionally reach transfer speeds in excess of 1Gbps, but much more consistently achieve speeds only nominally better than AC1200 despite being less than ten feet away from each other in the same room. Oh well.

Finally, can confirm that the BDP-S560 only does photos over DLNA. It's not like I was really gonna use it for anything other than playing old Blu-ray discs - nor did I expect it to be able to decode any modern video formats - but it would've been a cool feature!

Features

Went back to the thrift store for fun, and this time I snagged a TP-Link Archer A7 AC1750 router for $7! Found-out when I got home that it had OpenWrt installed and an admin password had been set :\ Took me a minute to figure-out that I had to press the the "WPS/Wi-Fi On/Off" button to get it to boot into failsafe mode, but then it was simple enough to SSH in and soft-reset it. Next I was hoping to get it back to stock (I may have bricked it once or twice in the process) and TP-Link's vaguely-documented TFTP recovery solution is a nice feature - though that took a few tries before I figured-out that the Ethernet controller on my Lenovo just didn't seem to be compatible, and then that the Ethernet on my desktop was too slow to transfer a 16MB firmware file within the set window before the router would just continue to boot normally. Luckily, my partner's HP laptop worked great! Unfortunately, none of the TP-Link firmware files took, so it's currently on the latest OpenWrt release.

Now I'm comparing the three 802.11ac routers I have, trying to decide which should go where...

TP-Link Archer A7: AC1750, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0

Linksys EA6300: AC1200, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0

D-Link DIR-822: AC1200, 10/100 Ethernet, no USB

...But since I'm almost never transferring anything over my local networks, I'm not serving any kind of NAS, and my Internet connection will always be the bottleneck, I don't really see any real advantage to any of them anywhere. Maybe the Archer A7 goes wherever the Archer T9E goes? Whichever has the best DLNA implementation goes wherever the Blu-ray player goes?

Timely

AW2721D went on-sale for 37%-off in Canada today and Dell's offering an additional 10% off monitors, so $792 instead of $1400. Nice.

Native Linux gaming with modern distros on old hardware is... Fine.

Gave-up on Shadow of Mordor since it was never gonna run great on this GPU and my setup isn't officially supported anyway. The latest update to Inscryption looks for Inscryption.x86 but the included file is Inscryption.x86_64 - copying and renaming works. Borderlands 2 was next (never quite finished all of the DLC) and it worked flawlessly.

Unrelated, but recently helped a pal with their rural Internet access - fiber is coming and they're just out of range for LTE, so he's stuck on 10Mbps down/1Mbps up/700ms satellite in the meantime... Oof. They are on a waitlist for Starlink as well, which I learned has less latency because low-orbit satellites. Huh.

Underserved market or calculated gap?

What I want: A sub-$1000, 27~32", QHD+, DisplayHDR 600, adaptive-sync, 120Hz+ monitor.

What I can find: A sub-$1000 (in the US), 27", QHD+, DisplayHDR 600, adaptive-sync, 120Hz+ monitor - that costs $1400 in Canada, with the stupidest design ever or a reasonably-priced one with a much more subtle design that only comes curved.

Everything else remotely comparable is $1000...

Boom

Bought the Best of Boomer Shooters Bundle. Hedon is clearly made with love and runs well on Linux, but it's kinda rough. Project Warlock is great. DUSK is really good. Amid Evil feels way more grounded and focused than the trailers suggested, but is ultimately getting kinda boring as I progress. Ion Fury is good. Haven't gotten to Dread Templar, HROT, or Hellbound. Haven't used the ULTRAKILL coupon, but did use the Prodeus one and it absolutely lived-up to the hype; stellar game, and I can't wait for more.

More New-Linux-on-Old-Hardware Gaming

• BIT.TRIP Runner 2 - Beta fixes common audio issue, but seems to require a GNOME theme; didn't care enough to troubleshoot beyond that. Uninstalled
  
• DUSK - Works great, really slick game; better than it looks in the trailers.
• Inscryption - Beta works really well.
  
• Penumbra - So far, so good.
  
• Quadrilateral Cowboy - Runs fine; haven't dug-in yet.
  
• Serious Sam 3: BFE - Either runs like shit or looks like shit despite exceeding recommended specs; barely playable either way, which is disappointing because it's a good game. Uninstalled.
  
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Doesn't work. Various recommended fixes out there that seem to apply to a number of Feral Interactive Linux ports; most involve defining lib folders (either via launch options, symlinks, manual copies, compatibility releases, etc...) for specific package versions, but none worked reliably on EndeavourOS and most affected users seem to have turned to Proton. There's a 3GB beta update that I'm gonna try before giving up on it.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown - ...And this time, Feral nailed it!
  

Thirfty

Thrift store finds:

• TP-Link Archer T9E AC1900 PCIe card ($7)
• D-Link DIR-822 AC1200 Router ($8)
  
• 10/100 Ethernet ports though? Really?
• Sony BDP-S560 Wi-Fi DLNA 1080p Blu-ray Player ($15)

Gonna upgrade a bunch of stuff at my parents' house :)

Seeing what it can do...

 So the final build is:

• Core 2 Quad Q9450
• EVGA 132-CK-NF79
• 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (dual channel)
• 1GB Radeon HD 5850
• 320GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• EndeavourOS

...Removed jack2, added Remmina+RDP and Steam, and that's about it.

Steam works much better here than it did with the 8800 GTS, and I really wanted to see what it could do - so I installed some heavier games with native Linux support that would take advantage of the 5850. Started with Bound by Flame, but it wouldn't display anything; tried Painkiller: Hell & Damnation next, and it would crash after the splash screen; then I started troubleshooting and it turns-out both are apparently awful Linux ports that don't really work - so I played it safe and went with Portal, which ran great at 1080p w/max settings. Looking at what I haven't really played in my library, I'm thinking the Penumbra trilogy and Shadow of Mordor are the way to go. Next experiments might be to see what can be done with Proton on a GPU that doesn't support Vulkan, and how well Electron-based GeForce Now implementations work here; but the takeaway from all of this is that the C2D+3870 and C2Q+5850 make for solid Linux desktop computers with decent gaming options. Not sure I'd throw any real content creation tasks at them, but pretty happy with the results for spare parts and a free, modern OS.

For fun, I installed both the original Black Edition and the Hell & Damnation remake of Painkiller on Windows and... What the hell? The remake is awful! Why were reviewers so forgiving of that unnecessary trash, especially when the original holds-up so well!? Anyway...

Forza Horizon 4 Ultimate Edition and Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate were both on really good sales, so I splurged. Forza's nice, but the Ultimate Edition bonuses immediately gave me enough "influence" to just skip three of the four introductory seasons... Kinda wish I'd gotten to play more of those. Otherwise, this was the fastest I've earned an F40 in any game, my upgraded orange-on-white '73 Carrera RS is probably the closest I'll ever get to driving a Singer, and call me cliché but I love my Sport Quattro S1. Haven't touched Fortune Island or the LEGO stuff yet. As good as this all is, however, I think I'm ready for a new Need for Speed game.

MK11 is boring; I think the series peaked in 2011.

Traded-in a bunch of old/random/scratched/free PS2, PS3, Wii, and Vita games for Metroid: Samus Returns, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and a Wii MotionPlus... Though to be fair, one of the trade-ins was a sealed copy of Demon's Souls for PS3 that I got for free years ago and never opened :)

Bogus

Rad isn't fun. It looks great, combat feels alright, it's all random enough to keep exploration interesting, and the mutation mechanic is neat... But the first two worlds just aren't engaging enough after a while to justify the grind and the game is surprisingly unoptimised on PC. It feels like the initial character-building would've been considerably more enjoyable if more was carried-over between runs, but instead I just got bored after a few days of repetition and the whole game felt like more and more of a slog with each death. I only paid ~$7 for it and it was fun for a few hours, but I honestly just gave-up and uninstalled it... And then re-installed it because it got under my skin and I still want to see more. Looking through old reviews and Double Fine's Discord, I see I'm not alone in my experience :\

Wasn't so bad...

...Finished Mooncrash.

Got to try a bunch of Switch games:

• Mario Golf: Super Rush - Solid golf game, twist is interesting, kinda lost interest after unlocking all the courses.
• Mario Tennis Aces - Just started it; waaay deeper than I expected - still trying to wrap my head around the controls.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 - Neat, but the grind's kinda boring.
• New Pokémon Snap - Cute, relaxing; even if Pokémon isn't your thing, there's fun to be had here.
• Ultra Street Fighter II - The new-new graphics somehow look worse than SSF2T HD Remix, so I turned them off. Otherwise, really great package with a uniquely comprehensive version of the classic.
• Yoshi's Crafted World - Friggin' adorable and deceptively difficult. I love this series.

After patching Cyberpunk 2077 to 1.5, it was raining inside an elevator, a main NPC was ghosting and jumping around a cutscene, the dialogue choices still aren't indicative of the actual dialogue, and I swear Jackie's tuned ARCH sounds louder than it used to. Regardless, awesome world, great story, fantastic game.

The Ol' Switcheroo!

The more I think about it, the more the Core 2 Quad Linux system makes more sense with the Radeon HD 5850 and maybe a cheap SSD since the proprietary NVIDIA drivers don't seem to work so great with the old 8800 GTS and then fakeRAID support is the only limiting factor. For the Core 2 Duo, I still have a Radeon HD 3870 - and then the GTS can go into another Core 2 Duo E6750 system I have lying around that also needs a PSU.

Anyway, The Super NES Classic Edition is kinda perfect. First thing I did was unlock Star Fox 2, then played through Super Metroid (still holds-up), and now it's on to Mario RPG  - which objectvely looks best with the CRT filter. After that, I'm not sure... Likely Star Fox 2 and then either Final Fantasy III or EarthBound. Loved Yoshi's Island, but no rush to play it again.

Speaking of Nintendo, I finally finished Luigi's Mansion 3. Flawless art direction, oozing with character, technically impressive, genuinely intuitive treasure hunts, engaging and rewarding exploration, repetitive combat, and bafflingly boring/frustrating boss design; can't decide if the Gold Bones are an acknowledgement of that or not. Ultimately really liked it, but probably won't ever revisit it in earnest.

Also went back to Mooncrash; I think I may forego the all-five-in-one-run just because it feels arbitrary when so many of the crucial conditions are random; the further I got, the more exploration and experimentation felt discouraged - hazards, power outages, control modules, simulation corruption, etc... It all makes for an impressively-designed challenge, but also feels uncomfortably like a Souls-like speedrun.

Just for fun...

Finished Metroid Dread with 100% of the items. Last boss was tough - took me longer than I would've liked to get the patterns down, but was worth it to see the ending. Went back and played Zero Mission immediately after, and had a great time; kind of upset with myself for waiting all these years.

Tracked-down a brand new Super NES Classic on Kijiji for $120 CDN; stoked for that :)

Ended-up building this:

• Core 2 Duo E6750
• ASUS P5K-E/WiFi-AP
• 4GB 800MHz DDR2 (dual channel)
• 1GB Radeon HD 5850
• 320GB 7200RPM HDD

...And installed EndeavourOS. It's a really nice as a desktop/web/streaming/VPN terminal now.

...AND just for fun I got the Games for Windows Live DVD version of Gears of War running on Windows 10 21H2 on my CrossFire Pro setup. Finding all the patches and GFWL redistributables was annoying, but it works great!

Done for now?

Got the Zelda Game & Watch for Christmas, which is awesome (so many secret things!) and includes Link's Awakening, which is also awesome. Been reliving some great 1993 memories with that, while also playing the Switch remake - I think I prefer the original, but the countless quality-of-life upgrades, the expanded fishing game, claw game, and seashell search, as well as the dungeon builder are all really nice additions. Might dig-out my copy of DX and play that next, for research :)

Started Cyberpunk 2077, and it's honestly really good so far. Still overly-ambitious and pretty buggy, still full of questionable design decisions and a script in need of another round of edits, but ultimately a very impressive mash-up of Deus Ex and GTA. I'm in Act 2, and I'm hooked. Worth noting that playing on a PCIe 4.0 NVMe really makes the experience more enjoyable - long load times would've had me giving-up on it pretty early on.

Started Metroid Dread on a whim and immediately got sucked-in - and after a few days of on-and-off play, I think I've nearly finished it. Really slick, love all the little cutscenes, great traversal... Those unforgiving (optional) QTEs though, and those boss fights - didn't expect that in a Nintendo game; I have a feeling a lot of casual players aren't going to finish this one.

Otherwise, I added a Freeload cartridge to my Commodore 128, and I think I'm done with old computer projects for a while. The Commodore is better-than-new with Freeload and the SD2IEC carts; the DOS, 98SE, and XP computers are all done; the Core 2 Quad Linux project is done but underperforms thanks to NVIDIA's drivers and really only exists because I don't have any more Windows licenses; the unnecessary CrossFire Pro build is effectively just a second Windows desktop at this point; and the ridiculous AWE64-centric, SCSI-based MIDI workstation serves its purpose.

So now what? Hunt-down cache for the 486? Find two more matching video cards for the triple-SLI motherboard in the Linux computer and find a Windows License for it?

I'd really like to start using EndeavourOS as a daily option, but I just don't have the hardware for it - my 2nd-gen X1 Carbon's Adaptive Keyboard, detaching the base of my Surface Book, video games games on my 3070, the 2xFirePro V8800s in CrossFire Pro on my i7 950, fakeRAID on my Core 2 Quad... All of them just work better in Windows. From the parts I do have, I'm thinking maybe:

• Core 2 Duo E6750
• ASUS P5K-E/WiFi-AP
• 4~8GB 800MHz DDR2 (dual channel)
• 1GB Radeon HD 5850
• Whatever 7200RPM HDD I have lying around?

I'd go outside more, but it's been really cold :(

Endless

Decent deals in the Epic Holiday Sale + endless coupons:

• Cyberpunk 2077
• Graven
• Outer Wilds
• The Outer Worlds
• Red Dead Redemption II

...All for ~$85 CDN

Still playing Inscryption though :)

Unnecessarily Scuzzy

Overbuilt late-'90s audio production computer:

• 500MHz K6-2
• 320MB PC??? RAM
• MSI A5169MS
• ATi Rage 128 ???
• SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold
• AHA-2940W/2940UW
• 4GB Compaq SCSI HDD
• 8GB WD SCSI HDD
• Ricoh 6200S SCSI CD-RW
• Iomega V2000Si 2GB SCSI JAZ 2 drive
• Windows 2000 Professional

Getting it to boot from the SCSI CD drive was unintuitive and installing Windows was painfully slow, but otherwise works fine as a computer so far. Up next MIDI software and audio connectors.

Just Work

160GB array was faulty; turns-out my ~15-year-old spinning drives are dying 🤷 Got two 250GB drives going reliably, and I was really impressed with how everything just worked. The only out-of-the ordinary thing was switching-over to the non-HWE kernel... And then I tried to play some Steam games and the system crawled (reproducibly) to the point that I was opening a new terminal and killing processes just to get the mouse to respond. Did some digging, and seems likely it's related to the proprietary NVIDIA video driver; so now I don't really care about combing logs and troubleshooting that because that's not the point of this build. Maybe one day, but then maybe I'll take the time to get fakeRAID and 340.108 going on Arch :p

I need a new project. Was thinking of a K6-2-based Windows 2000 build that features an AWE64 Gold because I said it was a decent MIDI synth in an audio gear group on Facebook and they deleted my post... So now I have to prove them wrong and make some music on it.

Finally played Pony Island, and it was good. Stuck on a part in Inscyption - not because I don't know what to do, but because getting to that part feels a little too random after, especially since it slows-down progress significantly after such a fast-paced first few sections. thankfully, the gameplay is still satisfying.

Sisyphean

Finally got to:

• Blair Witch - Decent walking sim, got a few honest scares out of me, and thankfully brief. Didn't really feel the PTSD stuff, and that last section... Ugh.
• A Plague Tale: Innocence - Just started it, but interesting for sure.
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order - Soulscharted? Wasn't really what I wanted in terms of gameplay, but fantastic exploration. Might actually play this one again some day.

Picked-up:

• DiRT 4 - Fun, especially for $5; but after playing various configurations, I've concluded that rally games aren't really my thing.
• Inscryption - It's rare that I enjoy a roguelike or a deckbuilder, and this one starts-off as both... But I'm hooked and committed to seeing where this goes.
• King of Fighters IV - Was on-sale, feels good to play (been following this series since the beginning), and some characters didn't make the jump to 3D as gracefully as others... Looking at you, K'.

Revisited:

• Burnout Paradise Remastered - Still ridiculous, still fun, still overwhelming.
• Skullgirls 2nd Encore - Still don't get it.

Process

Basically this... 

1. Downloaded 20.04.1 'cause I wanted to start with 5.4:
• http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/20.04.1/ubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
  
2. Installed offline
3. Ran:
1. sudo apt update
2. sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic
3. sudo apt remove --purge linux-generic-hwe-20.04 linux-headers-generic-hwe-20.04 linux-image-generic-hwe-20.04

...As in speech.

I started with Debian in the '90s, then Slackware, then Ubuntu, then PC-BSD, then CentOS for work, then Xubuntu, then Manjaro, then EndeavourOS. Now I'm trying to find the best balance for my old Q9450 + 8800 GTS, and it looked like Ubuntu was the way: Out-of-the-box NVIDIA fakeRAID support, native kernel support for NVIDIA's proprietary video drivers, and an LTS branch... But then 20.04.3 went to a newer kernel and the video drivers broke - there're patches for that, but I was kinda hoping for something that would just work. Tried 18.04 for fun, but it didn't entirely like the fakeRAID setup and now I'm thinking Ubuntu 20.04 on 5.4 looks like the safest bet to keep that late-2000s hardware relevant until 2030 - if I'm reading this chart correctly.

System is:

• Core 2 Quad Q9450
• EVGA 132-CK-NF79
• 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (dual channel)
• 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS
• 2x160GB 7200RPM SATA HDDs (RAID 0)

I lied...

PS5 games on sale for $40~$60 CDN, and I haven't bought any. Did get Gravity Rush 2 and Fist of the North Star though... Did I miss anything?

Notice a theme?

• Mooncrash started to feel unwieldy as I got closer to the end and I've let it fall by the wayside.
• Almost done Payback but one of the off-road races feels incredibly broken and just stopped being fun after a few tries.
• Gears 5 is really solid but I ran into one boss fight that I had to quit before I got too angry at it.

Been playing:

• Pumpkin Jack is fun and light and looks great and it won't remember my VSync setting and sometimes forgets my RTX setting and the writing is cringey and the VO is worse and the cinematics are redundant.
• Battlefield V was fine; Nordlys was especially good.
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is really fun.
• Soul Calibur VI is ridiculous.
• Dead or Alive 5: Last Round and Dead or Alive 6 are just as accessible and satisfying as ever.

Got on sale:

• DiRT 4
• Flipping Death
• Glittermitten Grove
• The Sexy Brutale
• Street Fighter V Champion Edition
• Walkabout Mini Golf
• Zombie Vikings

Seems Reasonable

Paid ~$210 CAD for non-"PlayStation Hits" physical copies of:

• Bloodborne
• Concrete Genie
• Everybody's Golf (2017)
• The Last Guardian
• inFAMOUS Second Son
• The Last of Us Part II (new)
• MediEvil (2019)
• The Order 1886
• Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
• Until Dawn

Gonna go pick-up these two soon for ~$90:

• Killzone: Shadow Fall
• Persona 5 Royal (new)

...And I'm watching these two on eBay:

• Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise
• Gravity Rush 2

Will get to the actual PS5 games after these, and when they don't cost $90

Ultra Ultra, Echo... Safe to assume that was on purpose?

Missed Echo when it was released, got it on Steam recently, and very impressed so far. A little rough around the edges - audio mix made it kinda tricky to catch some of the dialogue so I turned-on the subtitles and caught a spelling mistake, lost dialogue altogether during one session, got an Unreal Engine crash message early on, there's some weird LOD pop-in, shadows projecting onto thin air, incomplete reflections (and if ever there was a game begging for raytracing...), no ripples in the water - yet I'm invested nonetheless. Such a cool premise and overall slick presentation, genuinely engaging and innovative gameplay mechanics; unless the infodumps get too convoluted or the difficulty spikes, I feel like I'm going to enjoy this one through to the end.

Went back to Prey: Mooncrash before trying Deathloop, and it's good. Didn't like how you unlock the security guard, but otherwise really impressive system overall. I still don't really like roguelikes though.

Got a PS5 Console for $93 CDN... $400 in points at the retailer, $100 in promotional points for spending $400 in points, and $37 in points toward future purchases. Never had a PS4, but since God of War, (maybe) Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection are out for or coming to PC, here's what I'm looking to pick-up:

• Bloodborne
• Concrete Genie
• Everybody's Golf (2017)
• The Last Guardian
• Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise
• Gravity Rush 2
• inFAMOUS First Light
• inFAMOUS Second Son
• Killzone: Shadows Fall
• The Last of Us Part II
• MediEvil (2019)
• The Order 1886
• Persona 5 Royal
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
• Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
• Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition
• Until Dawn
  

...And maybe Returnal if it's cheap? Really though, Bloodborne, The Last Guardian, and The Last of Us Part II are the focus here.

Oh, and I finished both parts of The Ancient Gods; it wasn't fun by the end. Reddit says there was a bunch of nerfing and buffing since release, and it explains a lot. It was fine, but I very much preferred the main game.

Somethingsomethingjokeaboutthisonegoingto11...

In-place Windows 11 upgrade on the X570 desktop: Fast, simple, slick... Actually kicked it off by accident. Ryzen TPM enabled, no VBS.

Clean installation on Surface Book: Disabled Secure Boot to boot from USB and bypass unsupported CPU warning, had to side-load Surface NVMe drivers, language bar acted all kinds of weird... Wiped and re-installed again, and everything was great. 

Clean installation on 2014 X1 Carbon: Enabled Intel TPM 2.0 over discrete TPM 1.2. Worked fine after a bunch of manual driver updates, but couldn't get the Adaptive Keyboard working properly... Back to Windows 10.

You wait 16 years, and what do you get?

Psychonauts 2 is perfect. The final act of the game felt a little chaotic/contrived/rushed, but also still worked and left openings for all kinds of side-stories, DLC, spin-offs, sequels - phrasing this as such to minimise spoilers, but I can't wait to play as Lili tracking-down brains, or Bob and Helmut recovering bodies, or Lucrecia working for the government... Also, the Bob's Bottles level really got to me; didn't expect things to get that heavy. Couldn't be happier, and it was kinda cool to see my name in the credits.

DOOM Eternal The Ancient Gods - Part One is too difficult at normal difficulty levels. For the first time in my life, I'm tempted to turn the difficulty down; and I'm not happy about it. I'm not sure if the issue is that the game's systems are so incredibly balanced that there's no longer any room for error or if the balance is so far off that it's just not as fun as the main game, but I'm teetering on just not even finishing it despite being at the final Slayer Gate and almost done.

Quake Remastered is fantastic and the new episode is seriously impressive.

The Bethesda-sanctioned DOOM and DOOM II add-ons are really fun - I'd completely missed BTSX!

Went back and played-through Need for Speed (2015) and Payback - both totally solid.

Finally got into Super Mario Galaxy and... Yeah, I dunno. It's really good, but I had way more fun with Odyssey, Bowser's Fury (which was awesome btw), Sunshine, 64... Maybe I should've played it sooner?

That wardrobe, though!

Hadn't been all that focused on any particular game the past few months until I finally got around to Super Mario Odyssey, and then binged that one hard; 363 Moons in 48 hours, and still going. Not sure how I feel about the boss rush post-game content, but I'm gonna try to get to 500. Overall though? Killer app, masterpiece, instant classic, etc... You get the idea.

• The Missing Link was alright; not as bad as I'd heard, but I'd've been fine having never played it.
• Jensen's Stories were fun, but didn't feel as polished as the main game.
• Sam's Story was pretty good, but I preferred the main campaign and The Two Colonels.
• Enhanced Edition is cool, but I really only jumped to a few favourite scenes; not gonna re-play the whole game.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War was fun; single-player offers a solid story with some really cool moments, and the overall campaign has pretty high production values; but it all felt pretty short, and didn't really hold my attention. Did go for both endings though.
• Got DOOM Eternal The Ancient Gods, and it's good; though I'm finding myself getting more confused as they pile more lore onto us - which is disappointing because I really liked where they were going with it. Gonna do some more reading, I guess. Paused for now, while we wait for the RTX update.
• Finally got through DOOM VFR - Really good game, with just a few inconsistently very-frustrating points.
• Wrapped-up Half-Life Alyx, and it was fantastic.
• Walked through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - VR Experience, and the control scheme... Oh god... Instant nausea. Not worth it.
• Started BONEWORKS, and it's not quite like anything else... Curious to see where they take this.
• Reinstalled Need for Speed Heat, bought an Aston Martin Vulcan, and almost unlocked the FXX-K Evo.

Decided to keep the Sound Blaster 16 and see what I can get for the AWE64 Gold - no bites so far.

Applied the NVIDIA Resizable BAR firmware update.

I dunno... Mostly just wanted to gush about Odyssey, a little. Still need to go back and play both Galaxy games.

Bouncin' around, bouncin' around, bouncin'

Took a break from Metro Exodus after completing the main game and The Two Colonels DLC; will get back to Sam's Story, but went back to Deus Ex: Human Revolution for a change of pace. After many false-starts over the years, I finally wrapped it up and it holds-up. Not bothering with The Director's Cut, and the DLC is fine; but I jumped straight into Mankind Divided before finishing The Missing Link and wow... Just, wow. Cannot believe I slept on that one for almost five years - it's one of the best games of the decade! Ploughed through that, started Breach and Jensen's Stories... So pretty, too! Maxed-out everything at 1080p except MSAA - 60FPS at 4x though. Then I guess it's back to The Missing Link, and then Sam's Story... But I also bought Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War because it was on-sale for $50 CDN and it's technically a new single-player Raven game!

Otherwise, I finally got around to testing my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold, and it works great... So now the question is do I try to get $200 out of that one or my complete Sound Blaster 16? Partial to the OPL3 on the 16, but there're so many more features on the AWE :\

Also, got $700 for my old 3930K+1070 PC... Dropped the price to $800 (seemed fair since you can find comparable new pre-builts for ~$1100) and I got tonnes of interest, but the vast majority was miners offering under $400 just for the video card.

Raptors! ;)

New computer is awesome; very quiet (better airflow in this case, Noctua fans), very fast (the 3070 is no longer bottlenecked!), and the build was mostly uneventful. The amount of pressure required to install AMD's Wraith Stealth is kind of terrifying, needed a BIOS update to get the DOCP setting on my RAM to work, and I accidentally removed my digital Windows license from my Microsoft account but was able to get it back by reviving the old motherboard and logging-in there with my Microsoft account... Microsoft support had told me I was out of luck, but I sure showed them 😅 Kept the PSU and three hard drives from the previous build, replaced the failing 1TB HDD from 2010 with a 2015 one I found in my parts bin, and since my VR headset works with the onboard controller on the new motherboard, the Renesas D720201 PCIe card I picked-up for the old one went to my brother's Z68 build so he could finally hook-up the front USB 3.0 ports on his Meshify C. Also, the power and drive LEDs don't seem to work on this case... Meh.

Speaking of  hard drives, I re-installed Anthem... But on the SATA SSD, so still not sure if PCIe Gen4 would help those load-times. Still fun to jump back into though; hit level 30, started playing the unlocked difficulty levels... Not really worth it; "Hard" seems to be the most casual fun that still yields decent rewards, in terms of currency anyway.

Tried Metro Exodus again, and it doesn't stutter anymore... Still kinda buggy in terms of mission completion conditions and lighting, but I wonder if the sudden performance issues were somehow related to the failing drive :\

Old computer is listed on Kijiji for $1000 CDN OBO; final specs are:

• MSI GeForce GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G
• Intel X-Series i7-3930K (6C/12T, 3.8GHz boost)
• ASUS P9X79
• 32GB (8x4GB) 1600MHz quad-channel DDR3
• Intel BXTS13A
• 2x WD 74GB Raptor 10,000 RPM (RAID 0)
• Corsair CX500
• Lian-Li PC-68

...Only one bite so far, and they were looking to trade; which would be fine, but they didn't have anything I wanted.

Unrelated, but one friend who was looking for a 2060 SUPER or better for Premiere finally gave-up and settled for a 1660 SUPER... Except he couldn't find one of those either. I found two profiteers for him - a 3070 for ~$1000 CDN or a 1660 SUPER for $450 CDN - he went with the latter, and he's happy.

Ten Years!

Started noticing more hard drive noises than usual from my desktop... While the drives were idle. Found a SMART warning on one of my 1TB spinning drives; backed-up the data, pulled the drive, checked the date code... August 2010! Nice :)

Started Below and got back into Knights And Bikes... Both are so great, visually; both have really interesting (albeit very different) narratives... And both have kinda tedious core gameplay loops :(

Buy Low, Sell High

Found all the things in-stock at MSRP or on-sale...

Final build:

• Ryzen 5 5600X
• ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS
• 2x8GB 3600MHz DDR4 CL16 (B-Die)
• MSI 3070 VENTUS 2X OC
• 500GB WD BLACK SN850 PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD
• 512GB ADATA Ultimate SU800 SATA 6Gb/s SSD
• Samsung HMD Odyssey+
• Audient iD14 (MKI)
• Cooler Master G750M

Just gotta figure-out a case and throw-in some data drives... Would splurge for a LIAN LI LANCOOL II Mesh Performance, but they're sold-out everywhere; saw a few over the holidays, but I balked. Still have that iStarUSA D-400 in the meantime, I guess.

I figure I put ~$500 into my current computer over the past ten years, going from the i7-930+X58 to the 3930K+X79, from the GTX 780 to the 1070... I'm keeping all the other parts, but should be able to get ~$1000 CDN for it after throwing-in a barely-used Corsair CX500 I already have, and an old 7200RPM HDD. Otherwise, it'll go to a friend or family member in need.

Spoiled

Horizon Zero Dawn is really impressive, and I really like it... But after Breath of the Wild, it feels kinda janky; facial animations, falling and climbing mechanics and animations, targeting enemies, superfluous voiceover and dialogue, muddled HUD that gets lost in the background, unreasonably dark areas...  I even kinda miss the stamina meter. I know it's not the same game, but it's hard to not draw comparisons and really only serves to remind me of what a stellar achievement BotW is.

Metro Exodus is just plain broken though; played on the highest settings without issue for a while, and then one day, after loading a saved game, it just started stuttering. Latest drivers, verified the installation, tried safe mode, etc... Still stuttering. Hesitant to re-download it because it's so big. Disappointed.

Duck Season, however, was frigging rad. Going for the seventh ending and then all the extras that unlocks now. Actually got goosebumps, and even yelped out loud more than once... I'm sure I looked like a fool, but it was worth it!

Oh! Finally went through Prey: Typhon Hunter's TranStar VR campaign; good stuff in there!

Finding a Ryzen 5 5600X has proven to be silly, more than anything else. Plenty of local shipments, and the profiteers aren't too bad, but we're in a province-wide lockdown and stores aren't accepting any kinds of online ordering or reservations, aren't answering their phones, and are encouraging customers to just show-up and try their luck... While there are reports of police pulling people over and issuing fines for unnecessary travel. Yeesh.

That's a wrap...

Finished-up with some games...

Control: AWE was good. Nice cliffhanger. RTX is pretty :)

Ion Fury put up a good challenge toward the end, but final boss was frustrating; won't be getting the DLC

Streets of Rage 4 was solid, but I still prefer the old ones. Felt great, music was alright, the final boss was maybe kind of a little too hard, will replay to unlock characters one day.

THPS1+2 was so nice; went through all the stages - didn't 100% it, but will come back to it for fun.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director's Cut has aged surprisingly well, though I don't really feel the need to finish it? Gonna give 2 an honest try as well, in anticipation of the RTX update to The Witcher 3.

First Step

3070 overclocks nicely to ~1865MHz from the 1755MHz factory OC. Next step is a case with better airflow, then I think an 5600X+X570+16GB of 3600MHz CL16 DDR4 RAM, then a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe SSD.

Finished BotW, and it was great. The second DLC pack though? Can't access any of the new story content without going through four camps+shrines where one hit kills us? Sure, but it seems odd that the trial to learn the new melee weapon (to the point that they remove all others) can also be won by wearing Majora's mask, picking enemies off with old ranged-weapons, and save-scumming. It's not impossible to do it properly - I got through all four with minimal out-loud swearing - but it's a noticeable spike in difficulty with an odd workaround, and I saw a number of parents complaining online that they had to pass it for their kids. Such a bizarre choice, to wall-off the main attraction of the $30 DLC while the hardcore options are available right away in what is ostensibly a family game.

"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.

Lots to cover.

While SEGA Heroes seems to've mostly supplanted Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone, I think I'll be going back to MPQ after I max-out my Shinobi team; got the rest of the Chaos emeralds in Sonic Mania; finished Shantae: Half-Genie Hero and it was really fun; bought and finished Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and while it didn't feel quite as slick as the Dragon's Trap remake, it's a fantastic Wonder Boy game; Cult of the Death God and Terrormania for RAGE 2 were solid and well-made and on-sale and not as great as Rise of the Ghosts but still worth my time; not really interested in GTA IV or V, so I started Return of the Obra Dinn and Quantum Break and they're both really interesting, but then...

My partner got me a 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and a slick Retro Built Games Porta Pi Arcade: Vertical, and then the Microsoft Store dropped the price of the Samsung HMD Odyssey+ to $299 CDN... So now I'm building an arcade cabinet, brushing-up on my Python, and figuring-out how to get a Windows Mixed Reality headset running on my ASMedia USB 3.0 controller and my 3GB GTX 780 - Spoiler: Windows Mixed Reality doesn't like ASMedia USB 3.0 controllers, so I tracked-down a PCIe USB 3 controller card with a Renesas D720201 chipset, and everything seems happy. Also, the 780 handles DOOM VFR just fine; requires a 1070, minimum, eh? :) Prolly gonna need to upgrade for Alyx though.

P.S. Moss is magical and Rhombus of Ruin is fantastic... And works just fine on WMR.

Yes, Wonder Girl.

RAGE 2 was great, Rise of the Ghosts was great, and Terromania looks really cool... But I'm holding-of for a bit 'cause that's a lot of consecutive time in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Grabbed Mad Max 'cause I figured it'd be really similar - and it is - and it's way better than expected, but also holding-off on that for the same reason. Got back into Wonder Girl: The Dragon's Trap and Sonic Mania for a chance of pace, finished both though I didn't really explore The Unknown in the former and I'm still short two chaos emeralds in the latter. I loved them both very much. Started Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, but three 2D platformers in a row was a lot too; so I finally Grabbed Grand Theft Auto IV and V... Do not like how IV started, but it's getting better. V is incredibly slick (and a 90GB download!), but I'm gonna give IV a bit more time before I really dig-in.

Otherwise, Marvel Puzzle Quest has a taken a bit of a back-seat to SEGA Heroes... Wasn't sure anything'd ever significantly cut into my minor MPQ obsession.

So Much Data!

My ISP unexpectedly upgraded my account to allow unlimited data, so I re-installed RAGE... 60FPS w/max settings@1080p and Smart VSync, and yet it's kinda hard to go back to after putting 15-or-so hours into RAGE 2. It's still gorgeous and the gunplay is as good as ever, but everything feels kinda small - even more so than it did in 2011. The corridors feel cramped and the wasteland feels truncated. I thought I kinda missed it as I was playing RAGE 2, but now I know better.

I've also been tweaking RAGE 2 as I've played, and it seems to average ~35FPS w/max settings@1080p in Soft VSync Mode and no resolution scaling; I'm pretty happy with that. It does dip into the high-20s when certain effects get a little out of hand, but the only real performance gains I see come from either dropping to 720p or essentially knocking presets down to Low. Anyway, I love it; I haven't been this into a game in a long time, and that's what I'd really missed :) The Rise of the Ghosts DLC launched today and it's downloading (18GB... yeesh) while I'm at work and I'm pretty happy than I spent the extra $10 for the Deluxe Edition during that sale.

Been meaning to chainsword some Orks...

Rage 2 is a fantastic sandbox to play in; it's mindless, gorgeous, and satisfying... And taking-up a huge chunk of my free time... And is the first game to actually push my 780, though it still runs really well at 1080p on the highest settings; just gotta use soft v-sync and resolution scaling.

Took a quick look at video card upgrades, and the 2060 Super seems to be the sweet spot ~$500 CDN, but I can't justify it when the 780's still doing just fine.

Tested Crysis 2 on the CrossFire Pro system; could only get 1.0 to run on Windows 10 without trying too hard, but it was playable on ultra settings. Also tried Far Cry 2 which ran flawlessly at the highest settings. Gonna try Space Marine next. Just kinda looking at games I already own that have official CrossFire profiles :)

♪ Here comes the rage again ♫

RAGE 2 Deluxe Edition is on sale for $35 so I'm playing that next, almost done Gears of War 4 (which was on sale for $13; a little repetitive and contrived by the end, but I haven't lost interested like I did with Judgement), DOOM 64 EX was magical, DOOM 4 Vanilla looks really neat, Wonder Boy The Dragon's Trap is delightful but the difficulty curve seems to spike about midway through and I've kinda stalled on it, and Knights and Bikes is finally out and adorable!

⍥⃝⃝

So I didn't know that DOOM64 EX and PowerSlave EX existed until just now because I don't know why and I'm happy I found them and I'm thankful for Samuel Villarreal.

Totes Profesh

The CrossFire Pro cable arrived from China... Or Germany? The shipping labels were weird. Anyway, it works! The two cards together average 60FPS in FurMark - without MSAA at 1680x1050 - and hit temperatures over 90°C... 😅

Nah, eh?

Galaxy A5 took a decent spill onto a metal manhole cover... Repair costs vs. replacement costs didn't feel so good, so I took another look at the Pixel 3a for $549... And then Google dropped the price of the Pixel 3 from $999 to $599... And then I remembered that I had $285 in gift cards and rewards points, so looking at it as buying a ~$300 Pixel 3 vs. repairing a Galaxy A5 made the choice a little easier :)

A5's still a great phone, and unbeatable for the price, but I am pretty glad to be free of the Samsung ecosystem.