"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.