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.