I've been a little depressed lately, what with what appears to be almost every single organization I ever respected revealed, one after another, to be a nest of baby birds being eaten by vipers. Is this just how humanity is? Do ALL attempts to form any sort of organization just end in utter corruption and psychopathy? Is there any way to prevent the psychopaths from rising to the top and ruining everything anyone with good intentions set out to do?
Yes, already. There are leaks/rumors about its hardware power out there, and while it's not clear when it's coming, it does seem that Sony is working on a Playstation 5. One big question is, will it be PS4 backwards compatible? It seems likely, with how the rumors put it as working on the same hardware architecture as the PS4 does, but right now there's no way to know for sure.
The other big question is, when will it release? Will it be a 2019 system, or will Sony actually try to release it this year? I guess that will be interesting to see. More interesting will be seeing how much of a difference it really is from the PS4; I'm sure it will have better graphics, more 4K support, better PSVR support, etc, but there definitely is some degree of diminishing returns going on in tech these days. How much different will PS5 be from the "last-gen" Xbox One X?
And while since Sony has plenty of first-party studios I'm sure it will have exclusive games, the way that most third-party software now is also on PC really decreases the value of all of Sony and MS's consoles. Nintendo still has plenty of value due to all of their games, but Sony and MS? Even Japanese third parties are releasing a lot of their games on PC as well now...
They Are Billions is an RTS/building simulation game in early access on Steam. I got it last week, and have been completely hooked since; Steam says that I've played it about 23 hours, and that's probably accurate. The game has issues, and I can see why there is a bunch of controversy in the games' Steam forum, but overall it's a great and really addictive game. I'm really liking it, so I thought I should make a thread.
Basically, They Are Billions is a base-building-focused strategy game that runs in pausable real time. As in building sims like The Settlers, Tropico, or to a lesser extent Caesar, the core of this game is building up a large base and dealing with the nested requirements therein. Unlike a standard RTS such as Starcraft or Command & Conquer, but like those aforementioned titles, here resources do not run out, the challenge is getting all of the ones you need. There are a bunch of resources, and all buildings require not only a build cost, but also an upkeep cost in several resources. So, you need to keep scaling up every element of your base in order to expand and go up the tech tree, which requires a lot of space and planning. Fortunately you can pause at any time, and that is key for base-building purposes! I don't love management sims like The Settlers as much as I do traditional RTSes, as learning and managing this kind of games' complex, nested trees of building and resource dependency are not my favorite thing, but this game balances it well: it has more than enough depth to be hard to master, but is not as complex as some in the field, thankfully.
Building your base is the main focus of the game, but you do also control combat units. You don't need to manage peasants or such, once you build a building they do their thing automatically, but the army does need to be controlled. You only have five or six types of units you can build, so far at least, but it's a decent variety and the several types of towers add to your ability to defend your base as well. The unit-control element of this game still needs work, though -- the pathfinding is REALLY terrible, and trying to target a specific enemy may or may not work, which can be a big problem. I really hope that they refine the games' pathfinding and unit control systems before the final release. You really need to micromanage units. At least you can pause though...
As for the game, so far there is only one mode, survival. The devs promise a campaign of some kind will be in the game eventually, but it's not yet. In survival mode you control a human colony, and try to survive the zombies in that area. Maps here are randomly generated, though you do aways start in the center. This survival mode is not endless, however -- if you manage to survive 100 days, you win. Over the course of those 100 days waves of zombies attack you. Additionally, the map is full of zombies you can go out and try to kill, or deal with when they get close to your base. You will need to kill some in order to expand, or to reduce the number of zombies that will get attached to waves or attack you during a wave. It's a simple formula, but it works very well and leads to great tension as you try to get a base that will be able to withstand the next wave. On the downside though, the game is repetitive. Outside of the random factor of the map and where zombie waves come from, every game plays pretty similarly, as you build your base going on the same tech tree, expand, wait for waves that roughly attack at the same times every game (though, again, from random directions), and such. It's a great game and so far I'm definitely not bored of it, but They Are Billions doesn't have the variety you might expect from a great RTS.
Still, overall so far I love this game and am hooked to it. I've been playing it some almost every day...
SO, in the Nintendo Direct yesterday, Nintendo mostly focused on a lot of Switch stuff, most notably a Splatoon 2 single player DLC campaign addon (looks good) and the announcement of Smash for Switch, but before that they talked some about the 3DS, and announced five 3DS games.
WarioWare - Therre's a new WarioWare game coming, and it's 3DS exclusive! It sounds like it's partially new and partially old, as the game brings back 300 minigames from past WarioWare games and combines them into this new title. There's new content around the old minigames, though, and the idea of combining a lot of minigames from both touch and button-based WarioWare titles (though maybe not stuff from Twisted, unless the 3DS has a gyro sensor I don't know about or the convert them to touch control or something) into one game is a cool idea. I like the WarioWare series and will definitely be picking this one up.
Detective Pikachu - This one is a Western release of a game Japan got last year. It's apparently an adventure game, and looks really weird -- I mean, a Pikachu in a detective outfit who talks, with full words, like an adult man? How strange... but it could be interesting? I'm mildly interested at least. This is the one major 3DS exclusive on the list, and it's a port of an older Japanese title.
Dillon 3 - I forget the subtitle offhand, but this one is another later port of a game Japan got previously. The Dillon series of downloadable 3DS games are decently entertaining stuff and it's nice that we're getting the third one. I assume it'll again be a download title? (However, those animal-ized Miis are kind of weird...)
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - This port of the Wii U game is also coming to Switch. The Wii U game is pretty good, its short length and moderate challenge aside, so if there's much new here I'm interested. If it's mostly the same game though I might pass (until it's cheap), since I do own it for Wii U. I'm sure it'll be really good though.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story & Bowser Jr. sidestory - Okay... so to follow up last year's 3DS remake of the GBA M&L game, Nintendo... is making a remake of the third game, and not the second? And it'll be a 2019 release? That's kind of weird. I've never thought much of the M&L series, but Bowser's Inside Story is the only game in this series that I actually own and it's okay. I don't know that I'd buy a remake though, unless the addon content is good and it's cheap.
Luigi's Mansion - And last, there's a remake of Luigi's Mansion for the Gamecube. I've never exactly loved this game so I'm not too excited for this, but for fans of the game it's nice that it's coming back. The 3d effects in this one could be nice, I will say that.
On that last note though, the absence of stereoscopic 3D support in a lot of major first-party 3DS games from the past year or two has been disappointing -- think of how Mario Maker, Fire Emblem Warriors, Kirby Battle Royale, most of the latest Pokemon title, the latest Style Savvy game, and more all don't have any 3D support, while previous games in those franchises / styles on the same platform did. I know that a lot of people don't care, and 2DSes are surely selling well, but I at least really like the 3d and want to see more games that use it; it is the system's main unique feature after all, if they're going to keep supporting the 3DS tehy should support the one thing that really makes it stand out!
Anyway, regardless of that, I'm happy that the 3DS lives. Given its very good sales recently continued support for the system was likely, and Nintendo is providing that. It's clear that the scale of budget these games are getting is not like the 3DS games of years past, but this late in a system's life that is understandable, so it's mostly just good that it's getting stuff, and that some of it looks interesting...
For the Super Nintendo, apparently? From the looks of it that's the most recent game console this "man" has played.
Hmm, so when you're randomly blocking a stranger's path on the street, these techniques will "win" that interaction with another human being, because all interactions are contests, right?
John Oliver just did a great episode on the NRA's propaganda / gun-selling video division, NRA TV.
I had honestly never heard of any of these shows before. I'm obviously very far from their target market, but if anyone is watching these shows it's clearly not enough to make much of a general-public impression... which is good, considering how horrible the NRA's positions are in every imaginable way!
(On that note, if it's proven that the stories that Russia gave the NRA money are proven, that sure would be interesting... and hopefully damaging to them, but these days you never know.)
So, this happened about three months ago, back in December. I was thinking of making a thread about it, but never did. In early December, I finally updated to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, the latest major update to Windows 10... and either it messed something up badly or there was a very unlikely coincidence, because after the update finished my video card stopped working. Now, I bought most of a new computer a bout a year ago now, but I didn't get a new video card then, I just re-used my old one, a Geforce 560. With the good higher-end CPU I got it ran most games pretty well, until it died. It's really unfortunate that it failed like that, and bad if MS was responsible. But that card clearly seems busted now; it will boot up, but outputs 'snow' all over the picture, and Windows won't properly recognize the card and only runs in a low, 4x3 screen resolution with standard Windows drivers. Yeah, the computer was not usable at all that way.
Fortunately though since this is a modern PC it has on-board graphics, so for a while I used that. Of course that sadly limited me to one monitor, but at least it worked. It seemed okay for single-monitor 2d, but Intel HD Graphics are terrible for 3d and of course there is no multi-monitor support, so this was a very short-term solution. Worse, at least a couple of times my computer randomly rebooted while running off of the onboard graphics, so there seemed to be a stability issue. Maybe I just needed to increase the amount of HDD cache available for graphics, but regardless I wanted something better, or at least more stable.
So, as a short-term interim solution, I got a cheap (like $10 or less) video card from Goodwill and used that for a while. It has multiple outputs on the back but only seems to function with one at a time, so it still didn't get me multi-monitor support. Also it is, again, hopeless at 3d; it's an NVidia 8400 I believe, an old and very low-end thing. At least the computer stopped crashing with this card, though, so that was good.
During this time I kept thinking of what I should do -- do I get a new graphics card? The problem with that is, NVidia is going to finally release a new generation of video cards this year, and it'll probably be in the first half of the year. And worse, graphics card prices have gone INSANE in the past year thanks to cryptocurrency mining and mobile phones using the same RAM chips as video cards! Video cards cost double or triple what they did a year and a half ago, it's a huge problem for all PC gamers. I don't exactly love the idea of paying a highly inflated price for something soon to become outdated. So, I eventually decided not to do that and started looking on ebay.
Time passed, but finally, after almost three months, I actually bid on a graphics card and won it in late February, and it arrived last Friday. For $160 (a price that may seem high, but is quite reasonable for what I got) I got a Geforce GTX 960 4GB, a dual-fan model which is quite quiet thanks to the two large fans. I chose the 960 over a 1060 not so much for price, but for backwards compatibility -- I am still interested in getting a new graphics card whenever NVidia's next generation of cards releases, if I can afford it, and if I ever want my previous computer to get up and running again (which I would like to do for software that only works well on that OS and such) it'd need a video card, and I'd want something better than that 8400 in it. So getting a card with Windows Vista drivers seemed like a good idea, since that computer runs Vista. And after looking it up I found that the current 1000-series of NVidia cards don't have Vista drivers, so I went with a 900 series card since they do.
It's a good card too, significantly better than my old 560; at my monitor's max resolution of 1920x1200 (16:10), the 3d games I've tried so far all run at high and mostly stable framerates with the graphics options set high or max. It's great to finally have a real graphics card again, and to get a nice update too...
On the note of upgrading my computers though, this would be my wishlist:
- For the WinME P4 computer: a Voodoo2 card, because it can't run Glide emulation and thus a bunch of games don't look nearly as good as they should on its GeForce2 card. A GeForce 3 or something might be nice too, to run games like MGS2 at a playable framerate; that game won't work at all on my newer computers, and runs at an unplayable framerate on this one...
- For the Vista computer - a graphics card, or the 960 if I upgrade the newer one. Also it'd need its hard drives and power supply back, which I can do once I buy new ones for the new computer, something I think I will do soon. Also a larger fan for the back of the case would be a good idea, this computer has had heat issues at times. A small CPU upgrade, to the top one that motherboard supports, the Core 2 Quad, would also be interesting, if I could get a better cooler on that motherboard than the stock Intel cooler I have... I'd need to research that.
- And for the new computer, as I've mentioned before a hard drive (HGST perhaps), power supply to free up the old one it's using so it can go back into the older pc, and maybe a new video card whenever they release, depending on how much of an upgrade they are and the price.
Finally though I'd love for MS to stop breaking hardware in their updates! After this happened to me I researched this online, and found plenty of other complaints of people saying that forced MS updates broke their video cards and such. That should never happen.
So, a local ISP has been expanding out bit by bit. They're pretty new but I finally had to leave Cox when they offered cheaper internet with no data caps. They're basically pinky swearing they'll abide by the spirit of net neutrality even now that it's been repealed. Hopefully so. Anyway, it's a gig up, a gig down. Just this month they announced syncronous speed both ways, since upload caps have been artificial for a long while now. I'm loving them so far, and they're ALL MINE! For now, until they get really big, and get corrupted.
