TheMightyEthan

So, I'm having to return my 3060 Ti because the HDMI port cuts out intermittently. At first it would only happen after coming back from sleep and I could fix it by just unplugging and replugging it, but it's been getting worse and now it happens even if I do that. It wasn't available for replacement, just return and refund, and I took that as a sign that I chose wrong the first time, and used the opportunity to upgrade.

Deliver Us the Moon Started this last night. I've only done the first two missions, but so far I'm really liking it. At the end of the first mission there's a rocket launch, and you actually are flipping all the switches and shit in the cockpit, and it is one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game. I would buy a VR game that was just that (though it would need to be more detailed). It's also the first game I'm actually playing (ie not just benchmarking) that supports RT and DLSS, and it's so pretty. (And with DLSS even my puny 3060 Ti can run it at 4k 50-60 fps with full RT.) If the rest of the game stands up to first impressions it may be one of my favorite games I play this year, and I'm already looking forward to Deliver Us Mars.

I had this on PS4, and the free upgrade to PS5 just came out, which was advertised as supporting 60 fps and ray tracing, so I was excited to finally play it. Well, I have discovered it does support those things, just not at the same time, and the ray tracing is only shadows, not reflections. I must have reflections! So I bought the PC version for $6.

I didn't get past those bosses until I turned it on either.

Prey: Mooncrash Holy shit, that was great. If you've played Prey, it's more of that, except in a roguelite wrapper, and it just works so so well. The story conceit is that you're investigating what happened on a Transtar moon base shortly before the events of the main game. It's really well put-together considering it's an entirely different structure from the main game, and it fleshes out the story in cool ways. If it had been broken out into a standalone thing like Death of the Outsider then I might have been disappointed with the amount of content (just over 8 hours to completely finish it), but as an add-on it's fantastic. Grade: A+

I thought I was using it from the beginning, but it actually wasn't on for the first 8 runs, and then when I did turn it on found out it's not retroactive so I didn't get "credit" for those first 8 runs towards my resistance, which was another thing that irritated me about the game. I was this close to quitting when that happened.

By modifiers do you mean the "punishments" you get access to after escaping the first time? If so I only did one run after having access to those. As far as the other stuff, I mostly stuck with the spear cause it was the only weapon I could reliably make it far with (I liked its reach), but I varied the boons as I came across them.

Look what building a new PC has done to me!

That looks so amazing...

*looks at the 4k TV my computer is connected to...* Nah, but my tolerance for low framerates is higher than a lot of people, and I play with a controller, so as long as I can keep them north of about 40 I'm happy. Also upscaling has gotten good enough that outputting a lower res is less of a problem than it used to be too.

Good sound is more important than it gets credit for from most people.

That's true, I keep focusing on the "3060" part and not the "Ti" part, but based on benchmarks my card is basically on par with a 3070, so it's not low-end (for the generation) like I keep thinking it is.

Between Dan proselytizing and all the praise I've been hearing on podcasts I decided to bite. lol, okay, maybe not when they come out. For some reason I had late 2023 in my head...

Aww, now I have graphics card envy. I'll probably get a 40-something when they come out...

Still playing Mooncrash, still really liking it. Even though it's a different team, it's pretty obvious there was a lot of cross-pollination between this and Deathloop, a lot of the ideas in Deathloop show up in a less-developed form in this game. Which isn't a criticism, it's actually a surprisingly deep system for a post-launch addition to a non-roguelike game. For instance, things you do with one character affect the world for subsequent characters. So like if you pick up a health pack with your first character it won't be there for subsequent characters, until you reset the simulation, but rewards build the more characters you successfully escape with without resetting. It creates this situation where you're having to think strategically not just about your goals for this particular character for this run, but about your goals for all the later characters too, so you can make sure that things are set up in a way that enables them to do what they need. It's really cool.

$6 on Playstation, the last of the Telltale Walking Deads I didn't have.

Yeah, that's why I say it's a weird middle ground, because while the main gameplay goal has been achieved, the main narrative goal (finding out wtf is going on with your mom) has not.

Do you know what it is you didn't like about Mooncrash, or is it one of those things you can't put your finger on? As far as Hades, I really wanted to like it, and there's a lot there that's really really good, but there's just a few too many missteps thrown in with it.

Hades This is a weird halfway point between "beat" and "shelved". I escaped Hades twice, but I have to do it 8 more times to finish the story, and fuck that. I feel like that is the perfect example of my problems with this game: the core gameplay is great, but they just make you redo the same stuff so much that it turns into a slog. See the What Are You Currently Playing thread for more in-depth thoughts. Similar to Assassin's Creed Valhalla, this is really hard to rate. How do you rate something that's an A+ in some ways and a D in others? Grade: C, I guess?

Prey: Mooncrash Even though I loved the base game, I never played this DLC because for some reason the roguelite mode didn't appeal to me. Not sure why, I've definitely enjoyed other roguelites. Anyway, the full package was free on EGS recently so I snagged it. I've only done one run so far, but I enjoyed what I played. It's almost the opposite of Deathloop, you're playing as five different people on a moon base that's been overrun by Typhon, then as each character you play either dies or escapes then you jump to the next one, and your goal is to escape with all of them in the same run. (The explanation for the loop in this one is that you're actually another employee running a simulation.) It's really cool so far, and I'm looking forward to more. It's also been a good test case for whether VRR really solves my issues with PC gaming, and early signs are good. Game drops into the 50s at 4k max settings? No problem, don't gotta go into the settings menu to fix it, just let it fluctuate.

Hades So I'm having a better time with this game than I did the first time around. I started a new game, and beat Megara on my third run (got to her on my second but died), which is way faster than before. I actually made it all the way to the second boss on that run, and managed to beat him and get to the third area by run 8. When I played at launch I had 11 runs on record and never even got to the boss of the second area, and that was with God Mode on (I actually thought I was playing with God Mode this time but only recently realized it actually wasn't activated). I have since made it to the third boss, but forgot to look at my run total. I'm not frustrated with the progression the way I was when I first played it, I think partially just because I'm doing so much better. I got gud, I guess? It has crystalized in my mind what exactly I didn't like about it before though. I said it was that I felt like there wasn't enough progress between runs, and I think that's right in the broad sense, but more specifically I think it's because you have to play through the entire thing on every run, bosses included. In other roguelites, at least the ones I've liked, you only ever have to fight each boss once, but Hades makes you fight them all every single time. Also in other ones you tend to unlock shortcuts that let you jump to later biomes without going through the entirety of all the earlier ones in ever single attempt, but in Hades the only way out is straight through. It makes the runs feel more repetitive, and more padded with busywork at the beginning. All that said, unless I hit a wall I do think I'll manage to finish it this time.

The Game Informer review said it's like the t-shirt section of a Hot Topic collided with the anime section of a Suncoast Video, which frankly sounds awesome.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla This game is really hard to rate, because I really like a lot of what's there, but it's just so long. Even doing literally nothing but the main quest it took me over 60 hours to finish, because most of the main quest line should have been side quests instead. In fact, the game doesn't really have almost any side quests, because everything's just either part of the main quest or a little one-off world event that only takes a few minutes to finish. The way I traditionally play big games like this is that I play the main story until I feel like I want to explore around, then I run around doing side stuff until I get bored with that, then go back to the main story, and so on. In Odyssey I couldn't do that because the level gating forced me to keep doing side stuff to grind in order to be strong enough for the next main mission. Valhalla did technically solve that problem, but they "solved" it by just making all the side missions part of the main quest, so you have to do them to advance the story. Either way the end result is the same: I have to spend a ton of time running around doing random bullshit I don't care about instead of getting on with the story. It sucks, because in both games I actually did like the story, both the ancient one and the modern-day one, but they just won't let me play it. I like the core of the gameplay (even if it isn't as much the stealthing and assassinating that I really want from a game called Assassin's Creed), and the world is huge and varied and well done. I probably would even have really liked a lot of the missions if they'd been side missions instead of main missions, because then they wouldn't have felt like they were in my way, and they really are intricate and well made. Like Odyssey before it, this is a game that is so close to being great, but it just can't stop stepping on those rakes. Grade: C Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok This has a lot of similar problems to the main game, except it's much smaller in scope (I finished it in about 9 hours), it does a better job of separating out side quests from the main quest, and it's set in the realm of the Norse gods which is inherently cooler to me. Nothing fundamentally different though. Grade: C+

That game looks radical.