jordanlund

jordanlund, rok temu

Sounds like someone wasn’t able to ship product and had their licensing pulled…

jordanlund, rok temu

I was part of the hardcore build it yourself crew for years and years, but I find now that for the last 10 years or so now, and especially with the death of places like Fry’s and all the bullshit Newegg pulled, it’s way easier and cheaper to buy a pre-built box that’s maybe 90-95% there, then tweak what you need to tweak.

Get that manufacturers warranty and forget trying to part it out yourself.

$3,500 here.

www.magicmicro.com/14443-13/?gclid=CjwKCAjwgsqoBh…

jordanlund, rok temu

Hilarious that it even embedded the tweet so you can see it’s not an accurate quote.

Bad enough when humans do it, adding nothing.

jordanlund, rok temu

“Gaming”

“Sub $1,000”

My gut reaction is “choose one”.

You might be able to get a gaming laptop under $1K but get ready to replace it in 2 years.

jordanlund, rok temu

26th? I thought it was the 21st?

jordanlund, rok temu

Aha! Makes sense!

jordanlund, rok temu

Makes sense:

Xbox - 2001
Xbox 360 - 2005
Xbox One - 2013
Xbox One S - 2016
Xbox One X - 2017
Xbox Series S|X - 2020

4 years, 8 years, 3 years, 1 year, 3 years.

2028 would be on the long side but not unheard of. The reason for the big gap between 2005 and 2013 was the 2008 economic crisis.

2020 was the covid/supply chain crisis.

jordanlund, rok temu

Historic generations were about 5 years…

The big problem with the Xbox One was that it was underpowered because of the Kinect requirement, so they ditched Kinect then rebranded as the Xbox One S, throwing in a 4K Blu Ray player.

Still wasn’t enough, so the One X had full 4K capabilities.

If they had launched with the One X things would have looked a lot different.

jordanlund, rok temu

I just thought it was bad, probably AI generated, concept art.

jordanlund, rok temu

Because the 360 refresh was functionally the same, both the One S and One X added new functionality (4K Blu Ray, 4K Gaming).

jordanlund, rok temu

Microsoft required 10% of system resources be reserved for Kinect support, even in games that didn’t support Kinect features.

eurogamer.net/how-the-xbox-one-gpu-reserve-unlock…

That reduction in horsepower for the actual games showed up in reduced resolution and framerate.

Lifting that restriction allowed the Xbox One to reach parity with the PS4.

jordanlund, rok temu

How do we blame Telesto this time?

jordanlund, rok temu

Flipping back and forth between Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield. “Baldur’s Field” as it were.

jordanlund, rok temu

Looked at it and went “Eh, could be interesting, but I don’t buy EA games and it will be $20 at Black Friday.”

jordanlund, rok temu

Reading reviews of the pictured model, apparently they sounded like crap?

I mean, they’re beautiful, and the magnet attached mic is inspired, but if they sound like garbage what’s the point?

jordanlund, rok temu

Forget Barbenheimer, I’m going full on Balder’s Field and playing both.

So far, Baldur’s Gate III seems deeper. Just starting on Starfield.

jordanlund, rok temu

Google should have bought it out, finished it, and made it Stadia exclusive… Ah well…

jordanlund, rok temu

Totally expected this after the Fallout spinning head glitch:

youtu.be/ITOrKb5HP6s?feature=shared

jordanlund, rok temu

It’s a Bethesda game, what did you expect? ;)

I haven’t started it yet, but if past experience is any indication, the Xbox version should be far less buggy.

jordanlund, rok temu

Low bar. :) The Xbox One X has more RAM than the Xbox Series S.

jordanlund, rok temu

More shocking is the speed of the RAM involved.

Xbox Series S
8 GB running at 224 GB/s
2 GB at 56 GB/s

By comparison:

Xbox Series X
16 GB @ 560 GB/s

PS5
16 GB @ 448 GB/s

Xbox One X
12 GB @ 326.4 GB/s

Steam Deck
16 GB @ 88 GB/s

Switch
4 GB @ 25.6 GB/s

jordanlund, rok temu

More shocking is the speed of the RAM involved.

Xbox Series S
8 GB running at 224 GB/s
2 GB at 56 GB/s

By comparison:

Xbox Series X
16 GB @ 560 GB/s

PS5
16 GB @ 448 GB/s

Xbox One X
12 GB @ 326.4 GB/s

Steam Deck
16 GB @ 88 GB/s

Switch
4 GB @ 25.6 GB/s

jordanlund, rok temu

If it had 10 GB at the higher speed it would still be hamstrung, but not as badly as it is with 8 GB and 2 GB that’s essentially unusable except for maybe UI overlays.

jordanlund, rok temu

How long before they abandon this idea too?

jordanlund, rok temu

FTA:

“No matter what you choose or where you turn, you and everyone else sound like idiots, which adds to the realism of the experience.”

That’s not “realism” to me and was the #1 reason I refunded the game.

jordanlund, rok temu

It’s a boat anchor, it’s time for Microsoft to cut it loose and release a digital only Series X.

11/2020 to 11/2023, not a bad run, figure it’s 1/2 way through this generation. Time for it to go.

jordanlund, rok temu

We regret you overpromised too.

Remember this one?

Milo - 2010

youtu.be/Uieh3RfkCng

jordanlund, rok temu

The scary bit is, with ChatGPT, they could probably pull it off now… 13 years later…

jordanlund, rok temu

Not a monitor, but I run mine through a 7.2 surround sound tuner, then connect the tuner to the television.

Xbox -> HDMI -> Tuner -> HDMI -> Television

jordanlund, rok temu

Outer Worlds has a great sense of humor.

jordanlund, rok temu

I should say too… not a funny game, but for me, the funniest MOMENT in a game:

youtu.be/RJcPc6OQ384

jordanlund, rok temu

What’s the resolution on the TV? I’d think you’d want at least 1080p for it to be effective.

jordanlund, rok temu

"Oh? You hate your job? There’s a support group for that, it’s called ‘Everybody’, we meet at the bar!"

• Drew Carey

jordanlund, rok temu

Videocard Benchmark here:

www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Figure out your price point, then get the highest scoring card in that range.

Say for the sake of argument you don’t want to spend more than $300 on a GPU:

GeForce RTX 3060 TI at $302 and change, not bad.

Radeon RX 6750 XT out performs it, but it’s also $360 instead of 302. So are the extra 500 points on their performance scale worth $60? Probably not.

Prices are more of a guide, search around, you might find them for less. Just using the shopping tab at Google, I found the GeForce for $250 at NewEgg.

jordanlund, rok temu

Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.

You couldn’t access the story missions from the map, and you couldn’t replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely “because nobody was playing them”. Big brain move there!

In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level “strike”. So you’d pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.

In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren’t present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.

They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.

For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to “upgrade” to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn’t make better gear because they were afraid of “power creep” and legitimately “explained” that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn’t have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.

Maybe it’s better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they’ll never get another dime from me.

jordanlund, rok temu

And now they just remove previous ones you already paid for!

jordanlund, rok temu

I got about 1/2 way through the game, but as soon as I hit the first boss of act 3 I just couldn’t progress. He’d wipe the party every time. Walkthroughs were useless.

jordanlund, rok temu

The first thing I do in games like that is Zerg Rush to all the towers needed to open the map and unlock fast travel.

Once you do that, the rest of the game becomes a lot easier.

jordanlund, rok temu

Mass Effect 1 and 2 come to mind…

jordanlund, rok temu

It’s been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.

The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. “YOU DON’T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN’T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!”

And I was like “Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN’T want me to play are going to be better?”

Surprise… the game stunk up the joint.

But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I’d have a final score.

As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.

A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.

A game can be bad because it’s a bad game or it can be bad because it’s functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it’s pretty bad.

I had to give a failing review to Assassin’s Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.

Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.

jordanlund, rok temu

Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long…

“Were you able to use any of the original assets?”

“Oh, all of them!” He seemed super excited.

To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.

Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter… but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.

I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.

Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.

You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.

It didn’t matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.

jordanlund, rok temu

I have a hard time when people complain about loading screens. I’ve been gaming since the 70s guys, let me tell you about load times:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger

You’d start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.

Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again…

jordanlund, rok temu

But it was soooo much faster than tape! ;)

jordanlund, rok temu

It’s a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin’ here… A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.

The assets, art, backstory, it’s all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(

jordanlund, rok temu

I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went “LOL - story missions? What’s that?” and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.

No more money for Bungie after that, I’m surprised it’s somehow still going.

jordanlund, rok temu

I was surprised at the 7 scores until I caught the bit about how it’s all fast travel. You can’t just start on a planet, take off in your ship, point it at a moon or something and fly there.

OTOH, how boring would it be having 1:1 space travel?

…wikipedia.org/…/Penn_%26_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirr…

“Considered by Penn to be the “best part” of the collection, Desert Bus is a simulation trick minigame and a featured part of Electronic Gaming Monthly’s preview. It is the most notorious minigame in the actual game. The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time at a maximum speed of 45 mph (72 km/h). The feat requires eight hours of continuous play in real time to complete.[2][3]

The bus contains no passengers, there is little scenery aside from an occasional rock or bus stop sign, and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is simplified compared to the real highways: it is now completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly, and thus requires the player’s constant attention.[3] If the bus stops, or veers off the road it will stall and must be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points up to a maximum score of 99 points, which requires 33 days of continuous play. Although the landscape never changes, an insect splats on the windshield about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light fades, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.[2] The light eventually returns at dawn, but due to a programming bug it will cycle endlessly between dawn and night for the remainder of the game. The game cannot be paused.”

jordanlund, rok temu

Some people pay extra for that… :)

jordanlund, rok temu

Seems like the description of “No Man’s Skyrim” was a little off the mark. :( Not as in depth for space stuff as No Man’s Sky, or as story based as Skyrim.

Will be interesting to see how it evolves over time though!