Tag: Gaming

Xbox Game Pass, Play Anywhere, I Think I Get It

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The start of Q4 2020 was supposed to be an incredible time for PC gamers – or gamers in general. Firstly, Microsoft and Sony released their latest Next-Gen consoles, the Xbox Series X and S and the PlayStation 5. Secondly, AMD and NVIDIA battled it out in the GPU market, and AMD unleashed the Ryzen 5000 CPU family that ate Intel’s 10th generation for breakfast. And lunch. And supper, and dinner, and as a snack in between. Unfortunately for Intel, the only thing the 11th generation of Core Processors can do is hold AMD’s beer. In theory.

Excellent Hardware, No Stock, High Prices

I think by now, about six months later, we all know how things played out. It is not about having the best performance anymore. Instead, it is about who can get products on the shelves or into retailers’ warehouses so people can buy them. It seems like the price does not even matter. Some affluent enthusiast gamers may be more willing to overpay for their hobby, and first-time builders might not know any better. I am neither in the first nor in the last category. I could afford new PC hardware, but I am not willing to overpay a single Oren for any of it. The reasons for these prices are manifold, and many YouTubers discussed this very topic in many a video.

The story I want to tell you today is how all of that brought me into Microsoft’s console hardware and gaming service arms. Well, I guess I kind of already spoiled the reason: PC hardware is ridiculously overpriced, let alone readily available to buy. But there is more to it than that.

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Ryse: Son of Rome Review

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Germany-based company Crytek is best known for its Crysis and early Far Cry games and the CryEngine technology. Ryse: Son of Rome is probably not as well-known, and it certainly is not very popular. The game’s Metacritic score is 61, and the user score is 6.8. The biggest complaint I was able to ascertain was a lack of freedom and extreme repetitiveness. While I cannot argue with that, I also see it as a strength instead of a weakness. If you want to know why I encourage you to continue reading.

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Linux Gaming: Middle Earth – Shadow of Mordor; Get it to run, and run it fast

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Gaming on Linux is a challenge because only a few companies take the time to create native Linux ports of their games. It is even more challenging when those natively ported games do not run at all or do not run well. One of them is Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. I have bought this game specifically because it has a native Linux version – and because I remember that it was well received by media and players.

This game has two issues:

  • It refuses to start in full-screen mode.
  • The performance is terrible.

Let’s go through these two issues and see how they manifest and how to fix them.

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Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order Review

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It was until the end of 2019 when the Star Wars franchise was blessed with another game that truly deserves to be part of the Star Wars universe. The last good Star Wars game I played was Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic – and that was 2004! There were a few others in between and I may have played some. None left a lasting impression though, or otherwise I might still remember bits and pieces of them. And what did players get in recent history? Battlefront is what comes to mind. Well, it may have the Star Wars branding and characters and weapons and sounds. But to me, Star Wars is about a science-fiction fantasy story, a fairy tale if you will. I am not interested in a multiplayer shooter when I think about a Star Wars game. I am interested in an adventure and an adventure is what you get with Jedi Fallen Order. Is it a good adventure? Well, that is what I am here to tell you about.

Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is a story driven, 3rd person action adventure. You play as a young Jedi that is hiding on a scrap planet until one day the Empire arrives and turns his life upside down. From there you fight your way through imperial troops, wildlife, and some zombies. Kind of.

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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Review

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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is my first Assassin’s Creed ever. The first time I encountered Assassin’s Creed 1 I did not really like the concept. It felt weird to me that the actual interesting and cool gameplay was constantly interrupted by the modern-day stuff. It also did not help the game’s case that the German translation was atrocious. I had to revisit this series a few years later to get more interested. I did so by watching videos on YouTube where all cutscenes had been edited into one large video, effectively turning the game into a movie, sans the gameplay. Ultimately, I have come to like the presentation of the main stories. They are interesting enough and the cutscenes are of very high quality. As a result, I have seen about four or five of these “movies” and watched some gameplay of AC Origins. This really caught my attention and because Odyssey was supposed to be even more like an RPG, I snatched myself a copy once there was a good deal for it. But honestly, given the time I have spent with this game so far, the full price would have been warranted without question. I have finished the game including the DLCs, I am close to 200 hours and I think I am ready to share my thoughts.

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GTA V: Play Your Own Music Library on Radio

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GTA V was available for free on Epic’s Game store recently and so I snatched a copy. There is the option to listen to your own music as one of the radio stations. Unfortunately, GTA V does not ask you for a location of your music. Instead it expects that you copy the files you want to listen to to a folder in your user directory. Now, although my collection isn’t insanely huge, I still do not want to copy 30 GB of files. There is a better way though, one that I have not found on any other site: A Junction Point.

This is a symbolic link from where GTA V expects the music file to where they are actually located on your computer. This way you are not wasting any space and changes you make to your collection are immediately reflected in the game.

mklink /J "C:\Users\<Your Username>\Documents\Rockstar Games\GTA V\User Music" D:\Music

Remember to use quotes around paths that contain spaces.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: A Reason Not To Play?

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The next Assassin’s Creed will let you play as a Viking that is trying to settle in a new world with his tribe. I am genuinely excited about the setting. As a person that likes Metal music, I have certainly come in contact with Norse Mythology by ways of Amon Amarth and other bands. There is also a bit of that in some of the Marvel movies and a lot of that in the Netflix show Vikings.

Now what does that have to do with not wanting to play Assassin’s Creed Valhalla?

It is about the premise. You and your tribe sailing to England and taking land by force. The last part is the important one: “taking land by force”. From what is known about the game at the time of writing this blog post, one central element of the game will likely be that you and your comrades must raid random villages to expand your settlement. That means threatening or even killing innocent people, robbing them of their goods and burning down their houses. You are basically starting a war and civilians will be caught in the crossfire. That is what I have an issue with.

It is a similar experience with the Netflix Vikings show. I am not sure if I should like it or not – ignoring that sometimes it moves very slowly and treads on the brink of utter boredom.

I am not averse to violence in games. Apart from the Anno series and maybe some racing games like Dirt, almost everything I play revolves around violence – now that I think about it… that’s kind of sad. But I do not want to swing the anti-violence Mjölnir and debate whether violence in games is good or bad. I am certainly not that morally correct, at least not in video games. However, there is something about purposefully harming innocent civilians that makes me think twice.

It is too early to know anything for sure and I am basing my opinion on trailers and discussions that you can find on the YouTube. It is just something that came to mind and made me think about it for a moment. It depends on how violence in general, and with regards to the raids in this game in particular, is implemented. I hope it will not just be a mindless slaughter.

Benchmark RX 570 vs. RX 5700 XT vs. GTX 1660 Super, Ryzen 2600 OC, 3600MHz RAM

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At the end of last year, I was researching GPUs like a madman, trying to find the best option for price and performance and maybe also have some headroom for a future CPU upgrade. My starting point was a Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GB of 3000 MHz CL15 RAM and an AMD RX 570 with 8 GB of VRAM. A very good performance per buck machine in the summer of 2019 for 1080p gaming. It was purpose-built to be cheap with an upgrade path in the near future. However, my inner hardware enthusiast didn’t want to be content. It also didn’t help that the two games I was playing at that time performed rather poorly (which was the games fault, but you take every excuse you can get to buy new stuff).

Putting that aside, I have data of three graphics cards to compare, tested in four games at three different in-game settings – plus a custom one for two games that I used for playing. In addition to that, I have a bit of CPU overclocking as a result of troubleshooting and a RAM upgrade from a 3000 MHz CL15 kit to a 3600 MHz CL17 kit – which is running at 3400 MHz. More wasn’t possible with this motherboard and CPU. This post isn’t about the CPU overclocking though. I did that to see if the 5700 XT was limited by the R5 2600 and would perform better with a faster CPU. Well no surprise there, but as it turned out, the numbers I found were not caused by the CPU. More on that later.

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Far Cry 5 Coop Review

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The Far Cry series has been going on for several years now without changing too much of the core game mechanics since the first Far Cry I have played – which was Far Cry 3. What’s new in FC5 is a coop mode that lets you play the main campaign with a buddy. Far Cry 3 had some form of coop as well, but it worked differently by presenting a story unrelated to the game’s single player campaign. I’m not sure how version 4 handled multiplayer, but to my knowledge Far Cry 5 is the first Far Cry to support coop gameplay. It has a few quirks though, which unfortunately still doesn’t make it a 100% coop enabled game. We nevertheless decided to give it a spin and here are my thoughts about the game, its story and gameplay and how the coop experience was.

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Ghost Recon: Wildlands – Coop Review

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It was a dark night. Rain was pouring relentlessly from the heavens as a helicopter made its way across the border to Bolivia, going unnoticed against the black clouds. Any of the chopper’s noises were suppressed by the droning rain and constant thunder in the sky. Its destination was a remote location, a secret safe house where an equally secret meeting will be held. The helicopter’s passengers were a group of well-trained covert operatives and their handler. These were the kind of people you only call upon in dire need, when circumstances don’t allow anything other than an elite group of soldiers that can get any job done regardless of difficulty or danger. And all that without ever being noticed. They are effectively ghosts and haunt whomever they have been unleashed on. This time around their target is El Sueño, the biggest and most ruthless drug lord in Bolivia.

And this is where you as the player come in. The story is nothing particularly spectacular, but it provides a good enough canvas for an entertaining open world action game that justifies why you do what you do. I’ve played this game all the way to end in coop mode and this my review of the roughly 75 hours it took.

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AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Stuttering at 1080p

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Quick note before I go into any details: I did not find a solution for this problem, unfortunately. I’ll be explaining what happened and show frame time graphs as proof.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get into it. I’m certainly not the only one with this issue. If you employ the search engine of your liking you will find many threads covering that topic (like here and here and here and here and so on). Some managed to get it working, some did not. I’m obviously in the latter category.

What happens? From what I found in my research it seems like the RX 5700 XT GPU aggressively tries to save energy if it is not fully utilized. If you run MSI’s Afterburner or any other monitoring software, then you’ll see the GPU load and frequency being all over the place. In general, this is a good thing – if it does not affect perceived performance. And this is where it fell apart for me.

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Wolfenstein: Youngblood – Coop Review

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Wolfenstein Youngblood follows in the same footsteps as its three predecessors that sucessfully revived the series in 2009. Having liked Wolfenstein, The New Order and The New Colossus I thought that sharing that kind of game with a friend in Coop would be even better. This is the first installement in this series that allows you to do that and I’m a big fan of Coop gameplay. And by Coop I mean playing the regular campaign with a fellow gamer, not some unrelated multiplayer map or basic PvP action. I want to experience the story with somebody, have a ton of fun and discuss the game while playing it.

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Red Dead Redemption 2

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I’ve been a gamer for a very long time – it’s easily been twenty years or more (yes, I’m old). But, in the past year or so, my excitement has been waning. I have mentioned in another blog post that I was planning to replace my big tower PC with a notebook for (mobile) coding and writing – which I have done – and, in the short- to mid-term, get a gaming console to replace the video gaming part of the PC with something more casual and affordable. This day has finally come and the first game I have played has been Red Dead Redemption 2. Now, this game was many firsts for me:

  • First non-digital game since Steam has launched. I bought it in a retail store on a BluRay disc.
  • First full-price video game at 60€. Before that, I have always been shopping for special offers and discounts.
  • First console game.

I think Red Dead Redemption is something very special and I will try to explain why I think that is. One thing is for sure and that is the fact that it has rekindled the fire within me to play a video game on-end without pause. Unlike the other game reviews/experience reports I have written so far, this one is a bit different. I started writing when I was about 40% through the game and added to it at different stages of progress. In short: it’s like a diary.

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I could really bite myself in the butt right now

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Somehow, I managed to lose the Intel mounting bracket and standoffs for my Corsair H100i v2 liquid cooler. To be honest, I’m pretty sure I sold them together with the Intel motherboard when I switched to AMD Ryzen. Yes, you read that correctly.

Sold. With. Motherboard.

I can’t find that stuff anywhere in all the packaging that I always keep around until I throw away or sell the hardware. So that’s the only logical conclusion says Mr. Spock.Read More »

NVIDIA GTX 970 vs GTX 1080

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As mentioned in the Overclocking the Core i5 post a while back, my graphics card was limiting higher performance outputs, especially since it had to render games in 2560×1440. I hinted at an additional post dedicated to overclocking the GPU and this is it in some ways. I did overclock the GPU, but shortly after I also replaced it with a Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1080. Nevertheless, for comparison, I will include the overclocked results based on the custom graphics settings from the last post and also compare it to the 1080 using default game presets. This way you can easily compare with your own rig. I had hoped I could also include Ryzen tests, but unfortunately Corsair’s AM4 mounting kit for the watercooler is still travelling around the world. So, there’ll be another performance related article (hopefully) soon. That one will compare the overclocked i5 with the GTX 1080 to a Ryzen 1700X with the 1080. Not only in games, but also in encoding.Read More »