It's been almost 5 years since I made any major changes to my main rig. I'm still rocking that Ryzen 1800x, and that surround sound system. I upgraded from 32 GB to 64 GB RAM soon after building it, so it's ready for serious server things, and playing with RAM drives is fun sometimes. I recently got a breathtaking MSI RX 6800 Gaming X Trio 16GB. My old Acer monitors were still going fine, but 4K is the hot new stuff. I have the mindset that if I'm computing but not looking at a monitor, I'm computing wrong, so monitors are important. (That's why I despise RGB LEDs on literally anything, why I use black monolithic computer cases, and why I use unlabeled, unlit keyboards.) So should I go 4K, or go high refresh rate? Why not both?
Fallout Shelter first came out on iOS and Android ahead of the Fallout 4 release. Naturally, I checked it out, and I later played it on Steam. I noticed that radiation reduced the maximum health of dwellers, instead of being a separate stat. I didn't know that Fallout 4 would work that way, too. I've heard that Fallout Shelter is better than Fallout 76. Granted, this is a time waster kind of game with microtransactions, but it actually works!
Once upon a time, Valve released Half-Life: Source. Everyone expected it to have improved visuals, but were disappointed that it was merely a port. The water looked better, but since you're not looking at water for 99% of the time, that's not an improvement. Some industrious fans decided to make what they expected it to be, calling their project Black Mesa: Source. They set to remake Half-Life to a standard comparable to Half-Life 2. After practicing some mandatory Valve time, it appeared as a mod in 2013. A blogger wrote about it in 2014. Valve blessed the project, even granting permission to sell it on Steam. It released in 2015 with the same levels as the mod. They promised the ending Xen levels, which released in 2020. Said blogger bought this months ago, and it has been mocking him from his Steam library ever since.
Do you have a game that you like playing it one hour, then despise it the next? And that's repeated ad nauseum? That's my general opinion on Darksiders. I'm cruising through it for a while, then a boss comes around, and I wipe about 10 times on it, making me want to stop playing. However, there's some addictive quality here that made me want to come back of my own accord. It wasn't just a desire to finish it, but curiosity to see what happened next.
I kinda knew that Dead Space 3 wouldn't totally disgust me like the last 2. It has far more of an action game vibe going on instead of a horror one. While almost none of the puzzles in this game revolve around broken equipment, there's still too much snot on the walls. It's pretty clear that these alien marker things don't make good things happen, but religious zealot cultists don't see it that way. We once again join Issac Clarke in his grim dark future.
Now that Halloween is coming up, it's zombie time. Last year, I took a peek at the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. Thanks to Humble Bundles, I got some more at the same time as the others. This is more of the same.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a complicated game. It came out broken, made some people angry, and caused hardware upgrades. Having sunk 100 hours into this over a near 100% playthrough, and halfway through another, I'm still not sure what to make of this. When I realized that the next blog post would be the 256th one, I thought it would be a crime to not have it be this. So let me get this out of the way before going into something seasonally appropriate.
