crispy4000

Says this guy.

No one's not buying Elden Ring because of inflation, but with rents shooting up 22% since a year ago, it's not the same pressure as it once was. I'd be looking into building a new PC right now with GPU prices falling, if the housing market wasn't nutso.

High inflation -> less disposable income -> less game sales.

Loving getting back into the Xenoblade series with Torna. Something about it just feels so right, again. Maybe it's the lack of tutorial and gatcha, which slowed down the pacing in 2. It's also the first Xenoblade I'm playing on my 4K TV. Resolution is fine if I just pretend it's old-fashioned, like the Wii game was for its time. Framerate holds up pretty well too. But the depth of field in cutscenes pixelates the background... optimization was clearly important, but it's still very odd looking. Hopefully they can address that, if they haven't already with DE and 3.

Thanks for the reminder/update, I have some Doom games on there they gave away as freebies.

Splatoon 2 Expansion is now part of it too.

3D World is a must have, especially if you never played it.

Started up Torna today. It takes me back, in a good way. I've beat several big JRPGs since Xenoblade 2, including DQXI and FFIX, but Torna immediately made me feel right at home as if I never left. It also wastes no time, unlike XB2's tutorials. I've been playing lots of stressful games before this, so it's also nice to have something relaxing and cathartic to play. Resolution does seem to be a little better than I remember XB2. Other than some dithering an anti-aliasing artifacts, it looks decent on my 4k set. If XB3 is like this, I can deal. Much better than whatever Hyrule Warriors went for, blegh.

UE5 games trying to leverage its notable new features could run at ~30fps, and upscale from 1080p base resolutions, or worse. Raytracing couldn't easily be mixed in. Stutters from loading assets will continue to be a problem for UE5 and a challenge for developers to mitigate. I hope Crystal Dynamics, CD Projekt Red, The Coalition and others can help Epic optimize their shit for everyone.

What the hell is up with those special edition tiers. And making mirror mode a pre-order exclusive. This is the opposite of what a remaster should do.

Been playing What the Golf? on the side, picked it up in a Humble Bundle of EGS games not to long ago. It's pure dumb fun, a better Warioware in many ways.

It goes the opposite way for me. It's a flawed game with pacing issues, but still one of my favorites of the 3D Zelda bunch. I think the 'legacy' of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess being so vanilla in their puzzle and combat fundamentals actually elevates it.

First game I've beaten this year. I've been slacking, but that might just be due to Yooka Laylee's Impossible Lair being ... pretty much impossible. Death's Door feels like a mash up of many of the better Zelda-likes that aren't Zelda. It's a quasi Quintet 16-bit action RPG, with a focus on combat, quirky characters, and atmospheric music. I kinda wish it had more meat on its bones, but if you go into it with the expectation that it's a 10 hour game, it doesn't disappoint. Balance is a bit of an issue. You can level up your run speed in this game, which if you go that direction, makes one of the bosses at the mid-game a total cakewalk. At least the difficulty comes back by the end. Overall, I don't think this is better than most Zeldas. It's also a cut below Terrangima, but still is good in its own right. I can't say the same about the post-game, whose tasks suffer from a lack of payoff in the 'true' ending. No need to 100% this one. 8.5/10

Which makes Monolith Soft's productivity look even more insane. Xenoblade 1 - 2010 Xenoblade X - 2015 Xenoblade 2 - 2017 Xenoblade Torna, stand-alone expansion - 2018 Xenoblade 1 remaster & new chapter - 2020 Xenoblade 3 - 2022 They're the Insomniac Games of 80+ hour RPGs. Imagine if we got new Final Fantasy's or Dragon Quests on this timeline.

Woah! First time I can recall a major release being pushed this far ahead. I think there's still time for me to start & finish Torna. Just beat Death's Door, perfect timing to start something new.

Slay the Spire is super addicting. I had to stop myself from playing more. Also the controller ui works really well. Only roguelike that hooked me more was Hades.

Good / neat looking picks this week from Epic.

Beat Death's Door, my first game this year because of life getting in the way. It also looks like a pretty extensive post-game relative to the main stuff, so I'll probably do that first before dropping final thoughts. I just wish I knew that planting seeds in pots was part of it. I only used them when needed, so now I have a lot of backtracking to do.

It’s still an extra ~2 frames of input lag compared to consoles, give or take. To me, that’s definitely noticeable, especially for games where latency might already be not ideal. For reference, I wasn’t able to stomach Smash Ultimate’s input lag being one more frame than the Wii U game, which was already one more frame than Melee on the Gamecube.

Unfortunately, this is just not true. Doom Eternal on Stadia looks great - but the lag is just too high WWW.EUROGAMER.NET id Software's Doom Eternal is one of the best-looking shooters ever made. Powered by the id Tech 7 engine, the game del… Lag is the bigger issue, as DF highlights, though streaming picture quality will never quite match native due to streaming artifacts. At some level that might be splitting hairs, but the lag isn’t, especially in twitch games. It was silly for Google to put Samurai Showdown on there, for example. You do if you want to stream above 1080p, as is now standard on modern TVs. But even that became questionable with some supposed 4K games still running at that lower resolution. And it still doesn’t negate the issue of losing your games if it ever gets shut down. People were already skeptical enough about Google sticking with it with their history of canceling services. Those fears aren’t unfounded, and probably fed into the narrative that its failure was inevitable. The buisness model was a total mismatch.

Stadia’a biggest mistake was not giving you a subscription library from the start. $10 a month to access games you still had to buy, and may never get to play again if the service shuts down, is a terrible deal. But even if Google got out of their own way, I think a lot of companies underestimated how much of a niche streaming would be. It’s not a preferred way to play games for enough people. Sure, the occasional Cyberpunk might come around that pushes adoption, but Series X also isn’t less desired now because xCloud exists. It’s there for when you’re out and about with your laptop with a good connection. Or with your phone if you can deal with the form factor / buy accessories. And in all cases, can tolerate the input lag. The tech isn’t there quite yet for it to supplant consoles on TVs. Or even portables like the Switch and Steam Deck. That being said, I’m still kind of impressed by how close they’ve managed to get with the logistics of it all.

I kind of care, I kind of don’t. I wish they weren’t so far behind in the resolution game, but I also wouldn’t really want a Nintendo console that costs as much as a Series X or PS5. I’d like for their next console (hybrid) to match Series S. That way, they can benefit from one another with optimization work.

Use DepositAccounts.com to find banks that aren't shit. Almost without exception, if you're banking at a big name institution, you're doing it wrong. I have no maintenance fees or mandatory limits at two local banks I'm at.

With how I use it, I do. It’s the console I can also play on the go, if I’m okay with a hit to performance/visuals (in many cases). The Deck is much more of what you describe to me. Games won’t run any better if you hook it up to a screen. And portable make-good features, like FSR, are actively a bad idea to flip on if you do.