TFARCHIVE FORUMS

Finished much of Doom 3: BFG Edition, only The Lost Mission left.

Finished Doom 3: The Lost Mission and now playing WWE 2K16.

I started playing Robl0x to do something fun with my kid and now I'm semi-addicted to Robl0x.

THERE'SAVARIETYOFFUNGAMESFORALLAGESSTOPLOOKINGATMELIKETH

I was actually just saying to my wife last night, "It's so weird that Roblox and Minecraft are still a thing, they've been around forever". I bought Minecraft for my sisters' kids on the Xbox 360! Roblox first came out before the Wii! It's not a bad thing, it's just...so different to how the video game industry usually works. It's nice that they've been able to connect with multiple generations like that and keep going for so long.

Been paying more attention to my Switch lately.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter for the Switch. I'd already played Devil's Daughter on the PS5 and really enjoyed it. I didn't know they'd ported the games to the Switch. I know the company that made them is working on a remastering of the first game they did in this style, Sherlock Holmes: The Abandoned, which is a mashup of Holmes and the Cthulu mythos. Crimes and Punishments is fun, and Kerry Shale is pretty good as Holmes. Makes sense, he did play the Joker and Asrael for the BBC adaptation of Knightfall. He sounds like he's channeling Jeremy Brett.

Graveyard Keeper Deluxe Edition: A friend of mine told me about this one. Haven't started it yet, but it sounds like fun.

Gotham Knights Steelbook on PS5 - Won an auction I wasn't expecting to win.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) Steelbook.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla: The Siege of Paris DLC on the Xbox One.

So I've actually done a lot of gaming lately!

My son has absolutely fallen in love with the TMNT lately, and after playing through all the old retro Turtles game in the Cowabunga Collection, we went ahead and bought Shredder's Revenge. It's one heck of a fun game! It has the trappings of an SNES-era beat-em-up, but with a ton of quality-of-life and gameplay upgrades those older games. Steam says we've logged over 60 hours in it so far, so I think we got our $30 worth! The kiddo pretty much wants to play it every day, either by himself or with one of us.

I rebuilt an older laptop lately, if "rebuilt" is the right word...I bought a new SSD, scavenged bits and pieces from a couple old, retired machines and put them together. The end result is a bit of a mess, because neither Win10 nor Linux will play nicely with the old hardware. I wasn't really sure what to do with it, but it eventually found new life as a dedicated platform for less-demanding Steam games. It works great for the kid to play Turtles on, and I've gotten Portal working on it for my wife to play though as well. I was going to play BioShock (a franchise I've somehow never touched) but I got sidetracked playing 20 year old Star Wars games instead. Galactic Battlegrounds seemed a lot cooler in 2001. The interface is all sorts of a pain.

We also recently got a Switch! The games we've gotten so far have been hit-or-miss.

I found Breath of the Wild incredibly disappointing. The game presented an amazingly beautiful vision of a hugely scaled-up Hyrule, and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing interesting with it. The world is huge but it feels empty, because there are so few things to do in it. There are shrines and Koroks to look for everywhere, sure...but I just described 95% of the game's content in that one sentence fragment. It just lacks the diversity of goals, challenges and enemies that other, better open-world games bring. It compares poorly to games that are nearly a decade older than it, like Arkham City or the first Red Dead Redemption. Roughly contemporary games like Witcher 3 or PS4 Spider-Man blow it out of the water. What it does, it does well, but it doesn't do nearly enough. I'm pretty sure "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" got popular as a way to describe Skyrim back in the day, but I've never felt that it applied to a game more than BOTW.

The other titles we've grabbed are more "family" local multiplayer games, and I've been a lot more satisfied with those. Switch Sports doesn't quite reach the heights that the Wii originals did, but the new sports are fun and can see us breaking it out occasionally for years and years. Mario Kart 8 is apparently a Wii U port and I'm a bit surprised that they didn't make a dedicated Switch title for one of their best-selling franchises, but on the other hand how many Mario Kart games does one need? I probably haven't played since the N64 days and don't really feel like I missed much. Same goes for Mario Party Superstars...they both do exactly what they need to do and will probably get broken out from time to time for a very long time.

How old is it then, or is it the old story of non-Intel hardware and needing different WiFi adapters, etc? I patched up an Inspiron 1018 netbook the other week to stream DVDs to a tablet and be a music player and that's just about recent enough for 64-bit (2010). No way it would've run modern Windows with 2GB (or any reason to try) but the minimal ISO of Xubuntu is working quite nicely.

The bulk of the parts came from a couple of 2012-vintage machines, so not far off of what you were working with. My original plan was similar to yours actually, I was looking to make a low-cost streaming/DVD player, but that wound up not working out too well because the old AMD video cards cause trouble with both OSes I've tried. Mint runs beautifully until you try to watch a video or fire up a game made post-2000, and then it's nothing but dropped frames and game crashes. On the Windows side, Win10 runs fine once it actually boots (better than Win7 ran on either of the "donor" systems actually) but booting includes three minutes of black screen between the OS splash screen and the login prompt. According to the startup logs, it's spending that time repeatedly loading and reloading the AMD video drivers. The problem persisted even after a clean reinstall and none of the posts I could find about the same issue online ever seemed to find a real solution for it. It's been a while since I gave up on fixing it (I installed Linux after I had the Windows headaches), but I think it may have been pointing to BIOS issues and the Samsung board I used had very limited BIOS options.

Does the board have onboard graphics that in theory aren't being used? Are there any energy saving / power management features on the motherboard that can be disabled? And after a quick google when you say cards is that some funky AMD Crossfire arrangement using them both where ULPS being enabled would be a factor?

I was pleasantly surprised that there isn't much of a performance hit on an Atom processor for running Samba and using a symlink to /dev/sr0 as a fake ISO (Android VLC can play ISOs with menus but not VIDEO_TS folders). The bit that actually makes it work is using a wi-fi adapter with strong enough reception and stability.

The system was branded as "Radeon Dual Graphics" instead of Crossfire but it works about the same as I understand it. With the default configs it's supposed to switch between two GPUs depending on how much demand the system is seeing for GPU capacity. So it'd use the onboard chip if you're using Word or Firefox, and switch to the separate video card if you're streaming HD video or playing a demanding game. The Linux drivers had no idea what to make of it at all. It can tell that there's two GPUs in the system but it'll use one or the other 100% of the time. It defaulted to the onboard chip, but changing the configs so that it uses the more powerful card didn't make much difference. The BIOS have basically zero motherboard power options to experiment with, unfortunately, and disabling ULPS in the registry didn't help. I've thought about removing the second graphics card and seeing what happens with a fresh install with just the onboard GPU, but that's starting to sound dangerously like actual effort...

It's still a more serviceable computer than the dead useless HP Stream my wife's sister abandoned here after realizing the 32GB eMMC memory chip didn't have enough storage space to install MS Office on it after Windows was installed, though!

Warcry wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:47 amI found Breath of the Wild incredibly disappointing. The game presented an amazingly beautiful vision of a hugely scaled-up Hyrule, and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing interesting with it. The world is huge but it feels empty, because there are so few things to do in it. There are shrines and Koroks to look for everywhere, sure...but I just described 95% of the game's content in that one sentence fragment. It just lacks the diversity of goals, challenges and enemies that other, better open-world games bring. It compares poorly to games that are nearly a decade older than it, like Arkham City or the first Red Dead Redemption. Roughly contemporary games like Witcher 3 or PS4 Spider-Man blow it out of the water. What it does, it does well, but it doesn't do nearly enough. I'm pretty sure "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" got popular as a way to describe Skyrim back in the day, but I've never felt that it applied to a game more than BOTW.

I've not played BOTW, but from what I've read, they basically turned the Zelda formula inside out. In previous games, you'd enter dungeons to fight bosses and get weapons, then muck about in the overworld to find heart pieces. In BOTW, you muck about in the overworld to fight bosses and get weapons, then enter shrines to get heart pieces. I might've been into that, but the weapons break, and some bosses respawn during blood moons, so you can make a bunch of progress that gets wiped out.

The lack of variety reminds me of Zelda II: AoL on the NES. I might be tempted to go back and play the first dungeons and couple towns of that one. But, everything else is more of the same. You can level up your attack and defense, but the enemies just get stronger to keep up. Most of the items are just glorified keys, like the flute that scares away a monster in the overworld, so you don't even get to try out your new items on enemies.

Tantrum wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 4:24 pm I've not played BOTW, but from what I've read, they basically turned the Zelda formula inside out. In previous games, you'd enter dungeons to fight bosses and get weapons, then muck about in the overworld to find heart pieces. In BOTW, you muck about in the overworld to fight bosses and get weapons, then enter shrines to get heart pieces.

That's a good description of what they were trying to do! But it didn't work for me anywhere near as well as the designers thought it did. The overworld bosses were entirely skippable, and in fact entirely missable in a lot of cases. But that turns out to be okay because they were just as repetitive as the rest of the game. A Lynel or Stone Talus or Hinox that you needed to fight could have been cool, but the game usually doesn't present much argument that it's worth the time to stop and fight the dozen or so of each that are scattered around the map when you encounter one.

Tantrum wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 4:24 pmI might've been into that, but the weapons break, and some bosses respawn during blood moons, so you can make a bunch of progress that gets wiped out.

I thought that the breakable weapons were an incredible pain in the ass for the first 25% of the game. When the one good weapon you'd managed to scavenge breaks and all you've got to finish your battle with are farm implements because you haven't gotten any good drops in the last few fights, it's infuriating. Then the enemies level up and you've suddenly got more good weapons than you're capable of carrying, and the annoyance turns in the direction of "why doesn't the game let me sell this shit?" In neither stage did the mechanic make me think "this is fun!"

The Blood Moons were also infuriating at times. There's nothing more deflating than spending ten minutes and a bunch of good equipment to defeat a big enemy camp, only for all the enemies to respawn around you before you've finished collecting the loot drops. I'm not sure why the game designers thought they needed to reinvent the wheel here instead of going with the bog-standard "enemies respawn once you get X far away".

Tantrum wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 4:24 pm The lack of variety reminds me of Zelda II: AoL on the NES.

I felt the same way as well. A lot of people compared it to the very first game, but that game had a lot more variety going on.

Warcry wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 12:29 amI've thought about removing the second graphics card and seeing what happens with a fresh install with just the onboard GPU, but that's starting to sound dangerously like actual effort...

Guessing it'll work, the issue with multiple cards seems to be them effectively fighting each other during the boot/startup process before OS management kicks in.

And yeah, eMMC is the devil and guaranteed to give such a bad experience that people look elsewhere in future. A Lenovo Yoga I've got from around ten years ago had space for an SSD but needed a proprietary adapter. Decent build with the hinges, touch screen, but so little storage it couldn't do larger Windows updates without a flash drive plugged in. Much happier running Linux.

Finished Far Cry 3, really like it but took awhile to get into, did most of the necessary hunting early in the game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredders Revenge,

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Cowabunga Collection,

Bought from EB Games during sale.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (PS5).

Gone back to WWE 2K16, trying to get the remainder of the championship trophies.

Played and finished Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, really saturated in an 80's feel, quite liked it, moved onto the Resident Evil 2 remake because it's Halloween month.