Category: Uncategorized

Well after trying many different methods to improve my video creation methods, I’ve broken down.  I got myself an i7.  I still standby saying that most people do not need an i7, but if you want to do video editing, you probably should get one. Waiting 4hrs to render a 13min long 60fps HD video was part of it, but I really want to get a better quality live stream.

Audio quality will be the next thing I tackle, but video quality is the priority at this time.  Hopefully, I’m not messing this up.  I plan on doing the switch next week after I’ve taken some notes on FPS performance in a few games.  If I’m going to recommend i5’s all the time, I might as well get some hard numbers to back it up.  So let’s see how many more FPS I get in Star Citizen, DCS World, Naval Action, and Battlefield.

That’s all for now.  I had a neat IT adventure last week I need to share, but I have not the time to type it right now.

I picked up a couple of really good games during the latest Steam holiday sale.  Warhammer Vermintide had been on my wishlist since pre-release.  However, I noticed Dying Light for $20.  I knew absolutely nothing about the game other then zombies were in it.  Now I used to love me a good zombie stomp.  Red Dead Redemption’s zombie DLC was fantastic, and I have fond memories of DayZ during it’s early days.  Left 4 Dead 2 is also a great time.

These days though, the zombie games were just getting to be a bit much.  I started to look past zombie games as I did WW2 shooters.  There were just too many of them!  This was an ignorant way to do things.  I overlooked Dying Light.

It’s a parkouring zombie madhouse.  You get to run around in a rather detailed world completing missions for random people, or you can follow the story line.  I’ve been doing a bit of both, and I’ve been enjoying it.

So, ‘what’s the twist?’ I’m sure you’re asking.  Well, things get interesting at night.  The big baddies come out swinging for the fences, and the safest way to defeat them is to run like hell.  Unless one wishes a rather graphic up close view a Reapers from Blade 2, you should run to a safe house scattered around the map.

You get a 1 hour warning.  They will remind you on the radio continuously to get safe.  You then start to hear screams in the distance, and your watch starts beeping.  The screams get louder and much angrier.  Ohh myy, is it pretty spooky to experience the first time.

I’ve not played Mirror’s Edge, but I sure do like how the parkour works in most of Dying Light.  It’s pretty close to how it works in Assassins Creed, and it works well.  However, I still have those accidents where I overestimate a jump and die though.  Eh, playing in Co-Op helps with that.

A useful advantage of the parkour is that you rarely have to fight any zombies.  A majority of the zombies are pretty docile in the early game.  You can run right past most of them and scamper up a building with little worry.  If you make too much of a racket though, the zombies become a bit more aggressive, and it attracts faster moving zombies.  It’s a nice system that lets you plan out your fights.  Just don’t get surrounded as the game mentions.

So, how is the smashing zombie part?  It is a real treat.  The damage model on the zombies is some of the best stuff I’ve seen.  The damage is local to where your weapon impacts.  So you can smash off parts of a zombies face, skull, or whatever really.  If you like the Evil Dead series, this should be right up your alley in terms of the splatter factor.  I should note that head damage of some kind seems to be the best way to put down zombies in Dying Light.

It does have weapon lifespan thing, and I hate that feature in games.  However, the weapon repair isn’t that bad since you can run past most zombies as I stated earlier.  You can also find an huge amount of weapons fairly easily.  So when one weapon is ruined, you should have a good lineup to choose from.  In addition you can mod them, and you can create some pretty cool stuff with the options given.  Electrify your pipe wrench so it stuns people?  Huzzah!  Exploding Ninja Stars?  Hell yeah!  Most importantly, you can craft your own Molotov Cocktail.  You are going to want to stock up on them.

The story and voice acting are alright.  It’s not doing much for me, but it doesn’t hurt the game really.  I’m still watching the cut scenes at least, and I was rewarded by viewing a rather annoying character die.  So, that was a pretty cool part.

Co-Op play is yet another part the Devs nailed with this one.  It works well.  I can’t say it’s been flawless, but most issues are due to not being able to join a game during a cut scene.  The majority of the Co-Op gameplay I’ve done has gone really well, and been a lot of fun.  It really does help when you can warp all players to a mission critical spot when needed.  It’s easy to wander off in Dying Light.  A second helper is how Co-Op players ghost through each other so you can’t knock your friend off a building while performing parkour.  I’m so glad they have that feature.

Problems in game have been few with me clocking up about 20hrs into it.  There are a few odd character glitches, and I’ve had one co-op mission go REALLY wonky until it we had to restart it.  Overall, bugs have been few and far between.

So I’d give this one thumbs up.  I was lucky to grab it on sale for $20, and it’s a steal at that price.  I believe it’s currently $60, and I would say it’s worth full price.

**I’m sure there are some typos up there.  I’ll read it over later.  Who knows, only bots read all this anyway.  Haha!

I was very happy that the Mirage 2000-C was released on Christmas.  It was a nice surprise for a DCS plane to be released on time.  Props to RAZBAM Sims.  I know they’ve made aircraft for Flight Simulator for awhile now.  I hope they bring on a bunch of new things for DCS.

Fly by wire landings sure are easy, and have some quirks.

 

So I’ve been enjoying the HELL out of Fallout 4.  For all the shit it’s gotten from some groups, it’s a fantastic game.  It takes the best stuff from Fallout 3/NV while removing some of the things that were a pain in the ass to be honest.  Remember having to carry around three or more of the same weapon so you could repair it, gone! Screw that mechanic in any  game..  I hated having a weapon break on me after barely using it.  I can understand it’s realistic to have a chance of a weapon breaking, but those guns wore out fast.

The VATS system has changed a bit, and I didn’t like the change at first.  It no longer stops time.  This is not ideal when the enemy you’re trying to target is right next to you.  However, it REALLY does add to the emotions you’ll feel when playing.  VATS now causes a ‘bullet time’ effect where time slows down when activated.  So you can watch the Fat Man round slowly creeping up on your crotch.  Yes, you can die a bit easier with the new system. Although, It is pretty exciting to see the the danger coming your way.  A good game will provoke you in some way.  Fallout 4 sure does that in the right ways.

*ProTip – use vats to shoot enemy moltovs being thrown at you.  They will explode if you hit them.

Another new system has been added to Fallout 4 in the form of crafting.  If one wished, you could even craft whole buildings or towns.  Personally, I have enjoyed fussing with some town building, but the weapons mods are where it’s at.  You can really do some amazing stuff to customize your weapons.  You are free to blur and cross the lines between the types of firearms.  So your semi automatic pistol can become a revolver if wish and have the scrap.

The new crafting has changed the way I might play an earlier Fallout game in terms of bottlecaps.  You are no longer collecting junk to sell for the most part.  You’re mostly going to be using that junk to help craft and mod things.  You might need to save up the caps if you wish to buy a legendary item off of a trader.  However,  I’ve found that modded guns can be just as effective to get you through the game.

Foodies can rejoice in being after to craft your own meals now.  And while that’s a bad joke, the in game food crafting is not.  You can make some seriously stat boosting food items in game now.  Damage resistance, damage boosts, extra carry weight, and extra XP food items can be made.  You can save your stimpacks for serious injury and save lots of caps by not having to buy healthpacks all the time.  It’s great!

The story.  Eh, nothing really groundbreaking so far.  It works, but really brings nothing new to the table.  Although I’ve found the little side interactions to be more entertaining.  I guess I’ve been more focused on the gameplay and beefing my character up, I have not done much of the main quest.  Hmm, I do that a lot in Bethesda games, and that’s not a bad thing.  The world is more fun then following the main quest.

Bugs?  The giant bugs are a joy to gibb in the game.  As for the nastier kind that are hard to beat without a patch?  I’ve had it crash on me once in about 48hrs of play.  Although the game REALLY hates to be alt-tabbed.  The worst glitches appear after an alt-tab and require a game restart to remove.  Other then that, the bugs I’ve found have been hilarious.  Plant life ‘buzzing’ at an unnatural frequency,  cars vibrating across an area, and people being launched into a low earth orbit upon death.  I like these bugs.  I’d like to see MORE of these bugs.  However, I’ve only seen each of them once in my gameplay.

The graphics have improved a bit, but the damage model seems like a throwback at times.  The people in Fallout 4 are much improved, but when things go south and you get your critical headshot, the Gibs seem like stuff straight from Fallout 3.  Eh, they are still effective, they just do not seem as improved as the rest of the graphics.  I should note that the landscapes are beautiful by the way.

So, should you get it?  I would recommend it.  I feel like you’ll get $60 in gameplay out of it.  Although, it will probably go on sale soon enough.  I know I paid less then $60 using Greenman gaming.  I’m happy with my purchase so far.

Good luck Vault Dwellers.

 

I grew up at a time when computers were not the easiest things to use.  You needed your DOS boot disk, and you would not get far without knowing console commands.  Every game would come with a slip of paper telling you the exact commands to get your game to run.  Little me would screw around with everything else on a disk to see what would do what.  If a game didn’t work or I broke something on my dad’s PC, it was up to me.  He’d show me the basics, and let me learn on my own in terms of making it work.  Good times.

The bad thing about those times.  The computer prices at the time were kinda outrageous.  I believe the Tandy 1000 was around $2000 for the base machine.  I’ll have to dig up some old advertisements to show how much simple accessories would cost, but for now you’ll have to trust me.  I know I paid $230ish for a 1.2gb drive way back then.  Ugh..

Being about ten years old at the time, this presented me with some issues.  I really liked my games, but they would not always run well.   Buying a new machine for myself was out of the question.  I needed information on how to optimize things specifically for gaming performance.

At some point I started to learn the networking side to things.  This was fantastic!  I could get my PC to call a friends PC and we could play in the same game!  Just hope no one calls and 2nd line *beep* doesn’t drop your connection, or someone picks up the line before the PC does.  It can be awkward when your friend’s dad picks up the phone late at night.  Learning the Hayes command set helped a bit with the odd issues though.  It really helped to optimize things.

Shortly after learning the AT commands, I found out about BBS sites.  You’d dial into them and were presented with a txt base website.  Immediately after that, I learned how much the phone bill was for that month.  I think it was about $40 in the mid 80’s.  Oops.  I suppose this grew the night owl in me because the rates were cheaper late at night.  Heh, a ten minute call to California to the Sierra OnLine website was $10 with the night rates.  It was worth it $ wise though.  They had all the guidebooks on their site that would have been $10+ in the store.

The Prodigy Online network comes into the picture shortly after.  Now the BBS sites would have some cool info on things, but with Prodigy, I could get A LOT of cool info on A LOT of things.  Naturally, optimizing my games was a priority right away.  Special boot disks became a rather useful tool about that time.  Why waste memory booting windows up when I can keep it all for the game?  It just seemed like a no brainer.

Well then you have that whole internet thing..

I learned computers like a 2nd language in my youth, and I will only consider myself better then average with them.  My idea of just what average is may be a bit skewed though.  I just realize that so much can go wrong, and I’ve never stopped learning new quirks about specific hardware/software combinations.

Like a brand new game on my brand new personal computer that will crash on startup every time.  There was a specific bug for my specific Gateway computer (It was before I built my own) with the gaming port.  The game would not run until that port was disabled.  They did not explain why, but the fix worked like a charm.  I knew then that computers will not always make sense.

Be excellent to each other folks.

 

If you’ve found this page, I do apologize for it’s weak condition.  I’ve been meaning do get something in here for a long time.  Some recent shenanigans have encouraged me to shift gears and be a bit more pro active though.

So what you are seeing is pretty early, but I got some cool ideas for this website.

I always thought it was a bad idea to post detailed tech tips & reviews on Facebook.  It is a good thing to help ones friends, but I don’t really consider Zuckerberg to be a friend.  Perhaps he is a nice guy, I’ve never met him, but he sure doesn’t pay my bills.

I have been messing with computers since I was 4 years old, and I’m almost 40 now.  I learned to type by entering BASIC programs from magazine pages into a Tandy 1000.  I continued to learn PCs and networking over the years through playing games with my close friends.  Wise gamers will know how to tweak their machines to achieve maximum potential.

While the text on this page is new, the story of this website is pretty interesting.  I’m going to save that for the next post though.  I’ve already spent most of the night making sure things are up and running.  It’s nap time.

Thanks for visiting.