MattyP

Feeling proud of myself for not ordering anything in the sale... Have far too many games I haven't really played that have been bought in previous sales .. 🤣

Seems to work fine on my 980Ti and Ryzen 5. So don't need anything super powerful. Just needs a fair chunk of VRAM on the GPU.

Never a good time to buy anything TBH... Just buy stuff when you want and enjoy it! Having a look through the sales and I know there are plenty of things that have been reduced but.... Will I actually play them.. looks at my digital Steam pile of shame suggests not 😂 Think I'm just going to pick up the new Jeff Minter game instead. (Akkr Arrh)

So having just watched the show and really enjoyed it had a real desire to re-play the game again. Problem is no PlayStation console! Handily its getting a PC release on the 28th March (funny that!) so going to pick that up! https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-df-direct-weekly-the-last-of-us-part-1-pc-requirements-hint-at-an-impressive-port https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Part_I/ Perhaps a little pricy at £50 for essentially a 10 year old game but TBH not played this since the PS3 in 2013 so it will feel like a new game again to me and the visuals will be a step up from the PS3 version I played all those years ago. Saves me rebuying a PlayStation console too.

Long dev cycles in games is one thing that is actually putting me off gaming to a degree. I mean around 5 years for a game like say The Last Of Us? I know they are fantastic quality and all but I'm not getting younger... Also the hardware keeps cycling around fairly quickly too so as shown this gen we are effectively playing souped up PS4 games on PS5 (for example). Two years in and we have only had a few games you could say are truly a next gen PS5 game. Not really sure where gaming is going really as generations go on. But there is still plenty of variety I guess and you need to cherry pick what you enjoy. I mean I'd love another Mario game or Uncharted type game but I know I'll be waiting probably years to play such games. Think I preferred around the 360/PS3 era of gaming TBH as there were plenty of good quality games with great ideas etc. Now it seems mostly big heavy hitter AAA games that take years to get a release or lots of indie type games that don't quite have the production values of the older 360/PS3 games IMHO. I mean for example it's been 5 years since the last Forza Motorsport release on a XBox?! Etc etc. I guess AAA games aren't really my bag these days to be fair. Don't have the time for 30+ hour games or wait around for releases when I can get my gaming kicks elsewhere.

From my experience both the Series consoles have great cooling solutions out of the box. In fact MS have been pretty good at keeping things cool after their learnings from a certain RRoD incident...

Checks date nope its not April 1st yet! Odd IP to use who will actually remember the GGs now?! Weird the world of gaming at times...

Interesting game but found it a bit hardgoing lots of in circuit short cuts etc. Certainly very different to a regular Ridge Racer release that's for sure!

Good game that! Runs at 60fps too from what I remember!

I was thinking the same thing however then you loose one of the big selling points for this a smooth user experience and the plug and play aspect. I had an original PSVR and I was really impressed with it and how it all worked (less impressed with all the wires and box etc needed to drive it!). Eventually went over to the PC with an Oculus Rift S. This wasn't quite as smooth from the user experience point of view - sure fine if you stay within Oculus's walled garden but having Steam etc as a serparate app felt a bit messy and some games needed a bit of fiddle to configure etc. I expect the PSVR2 is a much more seamless experience with much improved tech over the original PSVR - certainly less messy than the original with cabling, cameras and the magic box needed! Looking forward to trying this at some point. However not sure about buying one not convinved its a big enough step up from my currently Oculus however the lure of GT7 with this might make me cave in....

Love Google maps for exploring - great for planning holidays etc! Think VR is a great way of learning things. Like I mentioned earlier think gaming will not be the thing that pushes VR mainstream it will be a "iPhone" type moment when the tech is right and the use case shown and people just get it.

VR is at this stage more of an experimental toy especially at the consumer level. It has lots of potential to provide an amazing experience but at the moment it's just not there yet as a tech for the masses. Think Sony are on the right track to make it more accessible - I was really impressed with the PSVR. But with my Oculus Rift S it's been not as smooth. Also bulky headsets etc but let's face it were are on the early stages of the tech and discovering things that work and things that don't. The tech will get better, less intrusive and feel more natural. Personally think a blend of AR and VR is where things will go and phones will be built into glasses type formats that provide overlays etc I'm guessing. Games won't be it's main application I don't think and it will be a breakthrough communication device first and foremost. The games will be a side use case. For example I have been now requested to be in office twice a week because of reasons however I'd love to just slide on a pair of specs and be in a full virtual room full of people and have those ad-hoc convos etc. Almost at life like quality. And not have to drive 65 miles, waste a couple of hours driving and burn some hydrocarbons to do it. Similarly chatting and interacting with family or friends who live on the other side of the planet. I see it as an enabling device. I can absolutely see why Zuckerberg is ploughing money into this. Unfortunately I don't think I'll get the level of detail I hope for in my lifetime and certainly not before I retire however maybe perhaps I might end up in a home* somewhere traveling around a virtual world living another life. For me VR has been an amazing journey so far and come a long way since I was trying to create a virtual representation of my faculty block at uni for my final year project in 1997! (In VRML if anyone remembers that?!). Sony were into VR even back then and had a fairly advanced VRML plug-in back then! Loving seeing everything moving forward and well being able to buy kit at affordable prices. *Home could be my brain kept alive in a jar 🌥️ Although I have wondered if we will be ever able to download our consciousness into a digital form and we could effectively live forever somewhere. Anyhow going very sci-fi here. Always been something I pondered over since I was a kid and then read things like Neuromancer.

Oh yes forgot about Iridis Alpha. Love Jeff Minters work on C64 (and his later/est games.) Think Andrew Braybrook also needs a shout too with Uridium too I mean that was better than a lot of arcade games at the time. Running on a home micro. There are a lot of great games out there in this genre really hard to pick one .. but seems I keep going back to Salamander hence my choice. The fact that I can now play it pretty much arcade perfect via MAME at home (stick and all!) Is amazing.

So I was over at the Arcade Club in Leeds at the weekend (highly recommended BTW) and playing plenty of old 2D shooters. So ended up spending plenty of time on Salamander and have to say it is my favourite 2D shooter. A number of reasons.. the speech, great levels and a mixture of vertical and horizontal levels which is not common in shooters. Also love the weapons and the multiples! Oh and to add to all that it's 2 player on screen simultaneously too. Great game.

Absolutely. Love this circuit in PGR4 in the snow... Oh cat 'n mouse used to be so much fun on this too!

Oh yes.. DriveClub loved the tracks in that. Grey misty roads of Scotland were some of my favourites.

So pondering this whilst working through various driving games recently... For me it has to be Fujimi Kaido in Forza Motorsport 3 just lovely driving road and scenery just flows so well. Probably a few others that come close but really enjoy virtually driving on this.

It's the old thing though and in similar way to piracy. Would the people using the stores in other countries to get cheaper games buy the games anyway at their regions store prices? I expect not. Who knows. There are plenty of ways of stopping this however just to inflate prices in poorer territories is just a bad show really. Just means they'll end up selling bugger all games in that area completely and people will just move to another area or just pirate the games anyway.

Can't blame them really given the state of the postal system here at times.... Sigh. In other news played Beat Sabre today (On my Rift S) and if you are getting one of these I'd seriously consider putting it on your list - it's a bit addictive! I know I'm late to the party 😂

Got a Series X at launch. Nice storage speed increases and lovely with GamePass. However went back to the PC a fair bit. Sold it for what I paid. Tried a PS5 for a while mainly FOMO and wanted to experience the new controller and loved Astros Playroom. Played a few PS4 games with souped up frame rates. Enjoyed spending a bit of time on GT7 then got bored of it and wasn't that fussed about any of the exclusives coming up so it went. Again got the same as what I paid. Late last.year picked up a Series S to try as a more convenient GamePass machine than my PC and it being technically a bit better. Decided it was perfect for what I needed small and quiet. Allows me access to many of the games I'd picked up on 360 and Xbox One whilst having the best features of the new consoles mainly loading speeds for me and quick resume. More than happy with it. No intentions of getting any more consoles TBH and may upgrade the PC at some point.

Think you can use any USB 2.0 memory stick (upto a max of 2TB). MS patched the firmware a while back to allow this. Although you will need to completely format the stick you want to use as it puts 360 partitions etc on it. https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/xbox-360/accessories/using-usb-flash-drive#:~:text=You can format and use,terabytes (TB) of content.

Yes I got a Speccy winter of '83 and was messing around typing in and learning some BASIC - interesting making it do things you'd created. Did the same with other machines C-64 was quite unfriendly in comparison with a whole bunch of poking about to get it to do anything. Think it was partly down to not having much cash and natural curiosity. Ended up spending most of my adult life coding the damn things 🤣 Oh and never got to make the perfect woman (Weird Science) or hack into WOPR (Wargames). Fun era 🤣

Wow.... Not bad going for a decade old game ... "Impressively, despite being over ten years old, the map for Test Drive Unlimited 2 is still 30 times bigger than that of Forza Horizon 4, for instance. Of course, it’s not nearly as pretty, but that’s an awful lot of map." https://whatculture.com/gaming/10-biggest-open-world-maps-in-video-games-2

The game works in single player only the servers got shuttered a while back.

"Eurogamer.net: Daytona USA was one of the miracles of the XBLA era, so grab it while you can." https://www.eurogamer.net/daytona-usa-was-one-of-the-miracles-of-the-xbla-era-so-grab-it-while-you-can