toxicitizen

Smaller doesn't sound bad to me. At this point I almost feel like I have too much Yakuza to get through. That's a very good problem to have, don't get me wrong. But at my usual speed, I can spend close to 100 hours on each of these games and from what I've heard 5 starts to suffer from bloat so as far as I'm concerned it's a good thing that they knew to scale things back a bit. That being said, I really hope they're working on some kind of rerelease for those Samurai-era games. I wanna play them so bad... edit: Oh yeah, I finished Lego Builder's Journey as well. It's alright. As a tech showcase for ray-tracing it's incredible. @TheMightyEthanwasn't kidding when he said it was the best looking game he'd ever seen. But as a puzzle game I found it kinda lacking. All the levels are either obvious as shit or "I have literally no idea what you want from me" with basically nothing in-between. It's cute and short, though, so I don't regret the 10$ I spent on it.

Yakuza 3 Remastered Thank fuck this is finally over. It took me like 8 months to get through the first half of this fucking game because of how frustrating the combat is. I'd play a chapter or two then a boss fight would make me lose my shit and I wouldn't touch the game for 2-3 months lol. I had this week off, though, and since Ghostwire: Tokyo is really more of a spooky night game, I figured I'd use this as an excuse to power through and finish this one during the day. The game overall isn't bad, though, and the combat issue was probably exacerbated by my playing it on hard but you can tell this was early in the series while it was still finding its footing. It's not as rough as the PS2 games but it's not quite at the smooth combat of Yakuza 0 yet either. Going back to this after playing Kiwami 1 and 2 is a bit of a shock. I don't know what they were thinking with these fucking enemies that block everything but it's just not fun. After a while I got the hang of it, though, and by the end of the game it wasn't too bad. I imagine levelling up helped as well. The story is pretty alright. Again, nowhere near as good as Yakuza 0 but I think I liked this one more than Yakuza Kiwami 2 in that regard. Maybe because it was smaller and more personal. It spends way too much time with Kiryu's kids, though. Like, I get what they were going for but after a while it starts to feel like pointless filler. Especially when you're basically at the end of the game and suddenly the game is like "You don't have to go do this important thing right away, just chill with your kids for a while. I'll let you know when you can go punch dudes again." Usually I go through these at a leisurely pace and fuck around in Kamurocho as much as possible but a friend actually bought me Yakuza 7 for my birthday last year so now I feel some pressure to just rush through the stories of each one so I can finally play it and not feel like an ingrate. At least I have my premium adventure save for when I'm ready to come back to this one and go achievement hunting...

My favorite Zachtronics game! Last Call BBS is great but I'd be lying if I said I'm not disappointed that it doesn't include a single game like Exapunks or Shenzhen I/O. Every game in Last Call BBS is great, and longer than you'd expect considering it's a collection. So the overall package really is an embarrassment of riches and it feels ridiculous to complain about it but as the final Zachtronics game I'm super bummed out that there isn't a single one that has you writing actual code. On the bright side, I still haven't touched the bonus campaigns in either Shenzhen I/O or Exapunks, so I do have that to look forward to. One day...

Yeah, I'm mostly comparing it to DLSS quality mode. I've yet to try a game where the performance was bad enough for me to lower it to performance mode although I imagine the difference would be more obvious then. I'm surprised to see you mention Hitman 3 though because I remember the Digital Foundry video mentioning that their DLSS implementation wasn't the best with some really obvious trailing artifacts and whatnot. That may not have been in quality mode, though. I'd have to rewatch the vid to make sure. Speaking of Hitman 3, I'm really tempted to buy it and replay the whole trilogy with ray-tracing but I still haven't gone back to finish getting all the achievements (and redoing those for the first one) in Hitman 2 and I'm worried if I try Hitman 3 now I'll never want to go back to finish off Hitman 2.

So I've been playing Ghostwire: Tokyo as my first proper ray-traced game. And so far the biggest paradigm shift seems to be that instead of staring up at the bright, shiny things I'm instead constantly looking down to see their reflections on the wet ground lol. Although, as good as it looks, I'm still far more impressed that I can run it with RTX on while downsampling from 4K and still get ~100 fps. DLSS is some black magic, man. Whenever it's raining and the image quality gets distorted I'm constantly turning it off just to make sure that it's not making it look worse and I can honestly never tell the difference between native and DLSS. I probably just don't know what to look for but still, that's really impressive.

Ah ok, looking at it again I see now they're just LEDs in the fans. My first PC's case was like that and I hated it lol. But that was only because back then I would leave my PC on overnight and it was in my room so... I don't do that anymore but even if I did I can just turn the light show off now. Are they all the same brand? If you have Corsair stuff you just need to install iCue. It's pretty straightforward to use. But from what I understand, different brands are notoriously difficult to get working together. So syncing them may not be possible. I lucked out because Corsair and Asus at least try to play nice with each other. It's still fickle as hell, though. Like I said, all it took was a new driver from nvidia to make iCue stop detecting people's RTX cards. Armory Crate (Asus's software) needs to be installed for it to work and depending on what order things start once Windows starts, sometimes it wouldn't sync right and my motherboard wouldn't listen to iCue. Sometimes Armory Crate would also cause the sync to fail on my RAM (at least, the internet told me it's due to Armory Crate; could easily just be an iCue issue), so they would get stuck on a color and not update anymore. That may have been due to me messing something up with my installs (or something else going wrong), though, because ever since I wiped everything and rolled back nvidia's driver to make the GPU work, I haven't had any issues. Actually scratch that, writing this made me look at my PC and the RAM is stuck right now. ------------------------- Small update: the power graph in Afterburner has its Watt axis max out at 300 by default, so most of the time the graph would just be an horizontal line, which made it kinda difficult to notice quick jumps. I messed around with the settings some more and was able to set it to a higher value. Which let me notice that the card's power draw jumped to like 400.8W for like a second while I was playing earlier. Not long enough to trip the alarm I set up but at least it tells me the card is indeed prone to random power spikes, even if that one was tiny. I'm cautiously optimistic that once I put in the 1200W PSU in I'll be able to catch a bigger spike sooner or later.

RGB bros! My mouse is synced with the rest but my keyboard is a stupid Logitech so it's on its own. I'm planning to replace it with a Corsair eventually, in no small part so I can finally get Logitech's garbage app off my PC for good. My current keyboard is working fine, though, so buying a new one really isn't a priority. Also yeah I might as well do a components list too: CPU: Core i9-12900K w/ H100i Capellix Elite AIO cooler Mobo: Asus ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming Wi-Fi D4 RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator DDR4 GPU: Asus ROG Strix RTX 3080 White Edition Storage: m.2 SSD x2, 2.5 SSD x2 Monitor: ASUS ROG Strix 27” 1440P, 170Hz, G-Sync Case: Corsair Crystal Series 680X Smart Case Speakers: Audioengine A2+ I only mentioned it for the GPU but basically everything that I could get white is white. Except for the monitor, which I found out like last week that the exact same model now comes in a white variant... Anyway, here's a better view with some actual light and a more camera-friendly RGB profile:

The Games You Bought thread didn't seem like the place to post an update on this so I guess this one will do. So earlier tonight I finally got another one of those random restarts while playing FFVIIR, this time with both Afterburner and GPU-Z logging the GPU's power draw. And.... yeah, I've got nothing lol. I suspected this might happen but if it is indeed a transient power spikes knocking out the system then whatever protection is shutting off the PC (the PSU's OCP is what I'm thinking) is doing so before the power actually gets to the card, or at least before the sensors can pick it up. So I won't be able to actually catch one of these until I swap the PSUs, it seems. I searched in Afterburner's settings a little bit more and was able to tweak things to make it easier. I set it up to play an alarm if the GPU's power draw goes above a certain threshold. I've seen the card go as high as 380W (this thing is supposed to have a TGP of around 320W lmao), so I set the limit to 400W. So at least I'll be able to just play without having to constantly look at the graphs on my second monitor. Also, I already posted this on discord already but after some fucking around with reinstalling iCue and Armory Crate and going back 2 versions with Nvidia's drivers, I was finally able to sync my RTX 3080 with the rest of my RGBs! I was kinda bummed out when it turned out not to work (my Asus motherboard worked so I expected the GPU also would) but I looked online and it turns out it was a recent nvidia driver that broke the plugin for everyone. It was just bad timing on my part lol. Now I just need to get more fans for my case... For the extra airflow, I swear!

More specifically I'm talking about

Final Fantasy VII Remake Finished it a couple nights ago. I'm kinda conflicted about it and have a lot of thoughts but I don't really feel strongly enough about it to write a wall of text so I'll try to keep it short. Like 90% of the game is fine. A lot of it feels like pointless filler but that bothered me more in the first half than in the second. Honestly couldn't say whether the game just got better or if I got used to it. Some of it was fine when it expanded the characters or gave you side-quests and fun dungeons to go through but some of it also felt like it was wasting your time by stretching things out needlessly. And then there's the ending... I'll keep this mostly vague and the original is like 25 years old at this point anyway but just in case consider this your SPOILER WARNING. So things start out great. I had been looking forward to the Shinra building section for the entire game so my hype was at its highest. But this is one point where they stretch things to their breaking point. By the time you've spent an hour running around Hojo's lab doing a party-switching dungeon, the game has basically done this to its own pacing: The tone of this section in the original is perfect. You finally reach the lab and see blood everywhere and it's like "What the fuck went down here? What did we just walk into?!" and it's the perfect setup for Sephiroth and the rest of the game. How they thought changing this section so drastically was a good idea is beyond me. And then there's chapter 18 which.... the less said about it the better. It's a clusterfuck of incoherent nonsense and what I'm reading online as to what is actually going on does not match what I saw in-game so either I missed something or the game did a piss poor job of explaining itself. So yeah, things end on a shitty note but overall the game was a ton of fun for the most part so I'm not too bothered. I was kind of annoyed as I was going through the last two chapters but that's about it. I'm still looking forward to Rebirth and the Crisis Core remaster. Some more quick nitpicks: Why the hell was that one character not a playable party member?! I was wondering if they'd even include him because it's basically the end of the game at that point but then they stretch things out so much that it feels lazy to keep him AI-controlled. Combat should've been party/turn-based JRPG combat like the original. Don't @ me! The weapon upgrade system was fucking tedious to use. Every time I had enough points to upgrade I just kinda went "UGH" because the animation to load into the menu was so long and as far as I can tell you couldn't just quick-swap betwene them. So you have to back out and go back in each time you wanna switch to a different weapon or character. Every time I had to go in there I wished I was playing FFX or FFXII instead.

Oh cool. I've been thinking about getting one of those. How much did yours cost? And yeah, I forgot it was on boot. That's probably not due to transient spikes then. I still have the 1000W from my old PC but I'm hesitant to swap it in, even temporarily, because it's also over 10 years old at this point. It's been working fine in my last two PCs but given how expensive my current one is I didn't wanna take any chances with such an old PSU, even if it was a premium model at the time.

It was basically brand new. I bought it with the rest of the parts back in December. How do you know for sure your total power draw? Are you just calculating it yourself or is there some way to monitor it? I'm asking because I searched in the apps I use and couldn't find anything specifically for it. For now all I know for sure is that a demanding game will push my 3080 to draw around 360-370W and my CPU to draw around 125W, because RTSS lets me monitor at least that. Other than that, PCPartPicker tells me my estimated total wattage is around 715W with everything factored in. That doesn't leave a whole lot of headroom and that's not including a few things I have connected though USB. I don't expect controllers and the likes to make a huge difference but at this point even an extra 5W could be what's pushing it over. That's why I'm curious to monitor a spike as it's happening because I wanna know how high they actually go. If I can see for sure that my system goes out right after my card spikes to, say, ~450W, then I'd be able to say with some confidence that it's definitely just the 850W that's not enough. And I wouldn't automatically assume your PSU was going bad. These cards are known for having these ridiculous spikes. It's honestly kinda ridiculous lol.

850W. It's supposed to be enough for the card (a normal 3080 needs 750W but Asus recommends 850W for this model, I'm assuming because it's overclocked) but I think with everything else in my PC it's basically pushing it to its limit. So there isn't enough overhead left for when the card has a transient power spike. At least that's my best guess. I did some research online and I've seen posts on reddit where people had the same issue and it went away when they upgraded to a 1000W PSU. So hopefully I'm right. I got the new PSU yesterday and the cables today but I think I'll hold off until next week-end to install them. I'll be on vacation then so if something goes wrong at least I'll have 2 weeks to sort things out without any stress. Plus I want another week to experiment and try to replicate the issue. I started logging the card's power draw whenever I play games so I wanna try to make sure that's actually what's going on. If it turns out to be something else then at least returning the unopened replacement shouldn't be a problem.

Oh man, Soulfly. That takes me back. I was super into them back in high school, around the time of their second album Primitive. I need to get better about keeping up with bands I love. I had no idea they were still going but looking at their discography on wikipedia they have over ten albums now.

I went with a current GPU instead of waiting for the 40 series SPECIFICALLY so I wouldn't have to upgrade my PSU. But this fucking card is just so hungry! Twice so far since installing the RTX 3080 my PC just shutdown and immediately started back up again, as if power got cut off for a second. I can't be 100% sure it's due to transient power spikes that the PSU can't handle but it's my best guess right now and this PSU was actually on sale for lower than the 1000W model so I felt like I had to go for it while it won't hurt my wallet too much. At this point I'm willing to take the loss if it means not having to troubleshoot beyond this. I probably should've gone for higher than 850W in the first place tbh but I just had to have a white PSU to go with everything else. At least Corsair sells some colored, sleeved PSU cables that are compatible with this model so I can always get some of those later on... edit: I will not let this setback ruin my white theme, goddammit! Can't do anything about the PSU itself but it's in the backchamber and will only be visible from the back of the PC. But I won't have filthy black cables be visible as they snake their way to my precious white components! ...and rereading everything I just wrote I now wish I had gone with a different color-theme because holy fuck this all sounds so wrong...

Oh right. Never used G2A or Kinguin, those marketplace sites are even dodgier, yeah. I don't know if that's still how they work but IIRC CDKeys used to get their codes from physical boxes from regions with lower prices. So they didn't technically buy keys and it was never fully clear how legitimately they were actually acquired lol. I know the few times I purchased from them, the codes I got would be a scan of a physical piece of paper although I just looked at my order history and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Is there something about Gamersgate I'm not aware of? I haven't used them in years tbh and only did now because they had the best price on Capcom Fighting Collection. I did try to buy something from them a few months ago but didn't because they didn't support Paypal at the time. But as far as I'm aware they're a legit/authorized key seller.

21.49$ in CAD but it's already down to 25 bucks on Gamersgate so it would've been even cheaper. I just don't think I'd play it any time soon. Besides, I try to avoid using CDKeys whenever I can unless I really want the game right away and the price difference is egregious.

Gamersgate had problems getting keys for Capcom Fighting Collection for some reason, so after a full day and still no key I asked for a refund so I could buy it somewhere else and they gave me a 50% off code as an apology. I was gonna get Days Gone too but the code turned out to only be applicable to a single game so I went for this instead since it's still fairly expensive even at a discount. On top of the base discount, the coupon brought it down to ~17$. I know it sort of came out and disappeared without leaving much of a mark but I've been really curious to try it. I loved both Evil Within games so I'm willing to give Tango the benefit of doubt. The only reason I hadn't bought it yet is the same reason I still haven't touched Deathloop and Doom Eternal: ray-tracing. I knew I was getting an RTX card this year so I figured I'd just wait and now I'll have a few games to put my 3080 through its paces.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix+ I mean, I guess? It's not really the kind of game you beat. I didn't see the credits or anything but I have finally finishing clearing all 250 songs on normal difficulty. Which, as far as I'm concerned, means the tutorial is over and the real game begins now. The hardest songs on normal were usually pretty easy and the easy ones are almost always dull as hell because of how slow they are (which ironically enough makes me perform worse in them because I have a harder time keeping up with the rhythm). Hard difficulty (and Extreme/Extra Extreme after) should provide a more consistently fun experience across the playlist. Overall, it's pretty much what I expected. At first I felt like the gameplay was simplified from Project Diva F because now you only get face button prompts and the arrow presses just register as their corresponding face button. IIRC in F you had both button and arrow prompts, which made things a little more interesting visually. But this one has some mechanics where you sometimes need to use the arrows for double presses because your right thumb can only do so much by itself so it made sense to change the prompts. The vocaloid music is something you just have to tolerate for that sweet gameplay but a lot of the songs are admittedly pretty catchy. Some are straight bangers but the vocaloid vocals really stick out badly in those. Like, there was one track that was a cabaret style jazz song that I thought was amazing until the robot voice came on and ruined it lol. But yeah, if you like rhythm games and aren't picky about the music in them then you really can't go wrong with this series. It's just so much fun.

Yeah, I wish I could invest in a proper surround setup but I don't really have the space for that right now. Yeah, I think comfort is a big priority for gaming headsets. The Corsair Void Pro is by far the most comfortable pair I own. They have these big cushions on the ears but the sound quality just isn't good enough to use all the time. It's serviceable when I play a co-op game with friends and need to be in a discord call but that's about it. Their being wireless makes them really handy for when I wanna listen to a podcast or audiobook while doing the dishes, though!

Plus, you have an RTX card so you can use DLDSR (and DLSS for that extra fps boost).

Yeah, it's definitely a budget card but the 30 series was a huge improvement on the 20 so it should perform really well as long as you don't ask it to do 4K.

Just realized that I forgot to post two big purchases I made in the last few weeks. Finally decided to upgrade to some proper speakers + headphones for my setup. In both cases, they're models that I've been wanting for years but that I couldn't afford until now. I needed smaller speakers that would fit on my desk without compromising on sound quality and decent headphones that won't give me a headache when I wear them for an extended period of time. The ones I already have sound good but they're so tight that they become uncomfortable really quickly whereas these basically feel like I'm not wearing anything. They're not as good at blocking out ambient noise but I'm only planning on using them in my room at night so that shouldn't be a problem. And even if it does come up, then I can just use my old ones. Oh and I got a magnetized PUCK™ so that I can hang them on the side of my case! It's hollow so it's useful for cable management, too. The cable on these is super long so I just wrap it around most of the time and only take it out when I wanna go lie down in bed with them. Not the worst twenty bucks I ever spent!