Video Games and Gaming Technology (In A Positive Light)

Been considering playing The Binding of Isaac again. I was hooked on that game when I was younger. Got it for free on PS Plus, then my PS4 broke, then a 9 year old reminded me of that game when I was in 9th grade or something.

Gave up after remembering most of my PC gameplay was just grinding out unlocks like a chore. The game has ~14 characters and ~10 bosses. To 100% the game you have to beat all bosses as each character. Spoiler alert, this is BORING. The new DLC also added 16 more characters, along with adding balancing that's just not fun.

Not to mention that the game's plot is blasphemous at best. They portray the religious mother character as a literal schizophrenic with a knife, because that's what happens in religious zealot families. The game's developer is also a fat guy with a beard and glasses.

Curious if anyone here plays or has played it.
 
Anyone here play the modern Hitman games? I've been playing almost all the old ones, and I was always curious about the modern ones (1, 2 and 3). 1 and 2 were unlisted because the third one has their missions in it. There are a ton of reviews on Steam complaining about anti-consumer practices and all that. Wondering if I should just pirate it at that point, but apparently it has online only Jewry.

I could not recommend the older games more, however. Blood Money is wonderful.
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God's lonely asperger said:
Been considering playing The Binding of Isaac again. I was hooked on that game when I was younger. Got it for free on PS Plus, then my PS4 broke, then a 9 year old reminded me of that game when I was in 9th grade or something.

Gave up after remembering most of my PC gameplay was just grinding out unlocks like a chore. The game has ~14 characters and ~10 bosses. To 100% the game you have to beat all bosses as each character. Spoiler alert, this is BORING. The new DLC also added 16 more characters, along with adding balancing that's just not fun.

Not to mention that the game's plot is blasphemous at best. They portray the religious mother character as a literal schizophrenic with a knife, because that's what happens in religious zealot families. The game's developer is also a fat guy with a beard and glasses.

Curious if anyone here plays or has played it.
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I have played it. The unlocks and such are pretty revolting but the gameplay is ghoulish and fun.

My brother got more into it, he was way better at it than I.
 
God's lonely asperger said:
Been trying to get all the achievements on New Vegas for around 2 years now. I only need one now, which is the awful caravan one where you have to win caravan 30 times. It's making me insane. I played it a total of ~20 times but only 6 were wins. It's so boring it's unreal. I tried to cheat the achievement with console commands, but it's a specific challenge that you can't cheat with the console. My current setup is that I have a kind of decent, not very meta caravan deck, and I've been farming off one guy on the NCR outpost on the Strip. I've been on that outpost for such a long time that I killed everyone except him because I was annoyed at their scripted NPC messages. At one point he ran out of money to bet on caravan, so I had to pickpocket him to give him 5k caps, then forgot that was all my money, so I had to then scavenge around for money to bet myself.

I'd give up, but it's the last achievement. I'm in it to win it now.
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After all this time, it is done.
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Ignore the guy in the corner. Probably drank too many beers or something.

2 years and 230 hours, but it is done.
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I got Stockholm syndrome from caravan. Hearing that dollar noise after losing for 5 times feels good.
 
This hit me "right in the feels" as the memes say. It was late 2005 and the Xbox 360 was about to release. I had some friends come over and we rolled up all the coins out of this huge water jug of coins I had been tossing money in for years. We rolled enough to buy the new Xbox and I went to Walmart a few hours before midnight and purchased my first of 7 Xbox 360s (most of my early ones red ringed and I bought a few special editions like the Modern Warfare 2 and Star Wars) A few days later I went to Best Buy and maxed out my Best Buy card with a 65" Toshiba TV. Then I picked up Need for Speed's Most Wanted. The Xbox 360 had a feature where you could add your own music to the HDD and play it while you played games. So this game was my first experience listening to my own music while racing and driving around in the digital landscapes. I put lots of techno and trance songs that I liked from my "raver" days on there and some early 2000's rap and alternative rock that was fitting for fast paced action. That game and that experience and that time of my life is certainly one of the most blissful memories I have of gaming. I actually just made a Spotify playlist similar to my old 360 one and started playing Midnight Club Los Angeles last week. That game is like the Dark Souls of racers with all the traffic. I did that to try to recapture some of the feelings of the previously mentioned time in my life. Then today I saw this video and..... right in the feels.



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I finally started Elden Ring, and am pretty early into it, but I'm enjoying it so far. Just got Torrent. I love the ash "spells" you can use and summoning the wolves is a lot of fun. I've beaten a few cave bosses but of all things that stupid tree sentinel is absolutely destroying me. Also can't seem to get the parry timing down on this game, which is frustrating. I've only leveled up a couple times so far so obviously a way to go yet.
 
Uncle Cr33pin said:
I actually just made a Spotify playlist similar to my old 360 one and started playing Midnight Club Los Angeles last week. That game is like the Dark Souls of racers with all the traffic.
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I'd forgotten about MC:LA, that game was amazing.

I've been playing the Phantom Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk, and it is so good. The Dog Town area is incredible, all the missions and activities have been high quality.

Some of my screenshots:
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I want this car IRL.
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Especially the flying version.
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Ember said:
I can't stop taking photos tonight. The visuals are nuts.
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Got to ask, how do you get that level of graphics quality, I have pretty much everything turned up to max and it doesnt look that good?

Havent played in a while though, might have to go back in and see what it looks like now.
 
Cuchulainn said:
Got to ask, how do you get that level of graphics quality, I have pretty much everything turned up to max and it doesnt look that good?

Havent played in a while though, might have to go back in and see what it looks like now.
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There are different definitions of max settings depending on what lighting model you are using: Do you a have a ray tracing capable GPU, and were you using any RT settings turned on?

If you have not played in a while, then it is likely the max RT settings available at the time were the 'Psycho' settings. These looked great but were very heavy on performance. But maybe you had RT turned off altogether?

There have been further massive improvements since then.

Seven months ago, CDPR released a game update with 'RT Overdrive', a new switchable path tracing option that takes it to another level. Cyberpunk is the first AAA game to feature path traced lighting. It is insanely heavy on the GPU, and if you want a 60fps+ experience at DLSS generated 4K, you will need a 4080/4090.

More recently, another update came out with the Nvidia Ray Reconstruction feature for AI denoising of path traced lighting. This boosted visual fidelity further, and the biggest effect was the improved appearance of game characters. CDPR's Jakub Knapik, VP Art and Global Art Director, discusses this here, at 26:55:


The whole roundtable video is fascinating, and features Nvidia's AI guru, Bryan Catanzaro, who takes a cheeky swipe at Starfield.

CDPR are a lot more experienced now, and are firing on all cylinders with the DLC and version 2.0 of the base game.

Finally, it should be said that the in-game camera can add another layer of polish to the visuals of screenshots, above that of normal gameplay, especially if you know a bit about photography. To get the best depth of field (bokeh) for a cinematic look, you need to experiment with camera placement, lens focal length, aperture, and manual focus distance.

To see what my actual gameplay looks like without the screenshot polish, watch this video from first post in the thread:



It is a shame that CDPR are ditching their in-house Red Engine for UE5 in future releases.
 
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Ember said:
There are different definitions of max settings depending on what lighting model you are using: Do you a have a ray tracing capable GPU, and were you using any RT settings turned on?

If you have not played in a while, then it is likely the max RT settings available at the time were the 'Psycho' settings. These looked great but were very heavy on performance. But maybe you had RT turned off altogether?

There have been further massive improvements since then.

Seven months ago, CDPR released a game update with 'RT Overdrive', a new switchable path tracing option that takes it to another level. Cyberpunk is the first AAA game to feature path traced lighting. It is insanely heavy on the GPU, and if you want a 60fps+ experience at DLSS generated 4K, you will need a 4080/4090.

More recently, another update came out with the Nvidia Ray Reconstruction feature for AI denoising of path traced lighting. This boosted visual fidelity further, and the biggest effect was the improved appearance of game characters. CDPR's Jakub Knapik, VP Art and Global Art Director, discusses this here, at 26:55:


The whole roundtable video is fascinating, and features Nvidia's AI guru, Bryan Catanzaro, who takes a cheeky swipe at Starfield.

CDPR are a lot more experienced now, and are firing on all cylinders with the DLC and version 2.0 of the base game.

Finally, it should be said that the in-game camera can add another layer of polish to the visuals of screenshots, above that of normal gameplay, especially if you know a bit about photography. To get the best depth of field (bokeh) for a cinematic look, you need to experiment with camera placement, lens focal length, aperture, and manual focus distance.

To see what my actual gameplay looks like without the screenshot polish, watch this video from first post in the thread:



It is a shame that CDPR are ditching their in-house Red Engine for UE5 in future releases.
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I will have to fire it up and see what i can do.

I have a top end 3090, fingers crossed!
 
What videogames are you all playing? I've been enjoying a game called Crashlands lately. It's like Don't Starve, but without the satanic imagery, and with a Sci-Fi theme. Pretty unique artstyle and character designs, every character is ugly but in a good way. The alien races certainly look alien.

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The lore is surprisingly interesting and the game is quite polished. I haven't encountered any bugs. The humor is very lighthearted and inoffensive but I've been enjoying it. I'm halfway through the game and thus far I've seen no ideological propaganda or occult symbolism or any of that lame stuff.

There's "deities" in the game but the game makes it rather clear that they're just normal alien lifeforms and not deities. One of them, the "Bawg", is a massive sentient ecosystem consisting of the Bawg's flesh, nerves, hairs and whatnot, and all the animals in that ecosystem are spawned from it and controlled by it. There is a race of sentient Bawg creatures, which are not directly controlled by the Bawg unlike the other creatures, but they are obsessed with politics because they need to constantly improve/keep their "ranks", which are decided by the Bawg. They all have an innate sixth sense of what their ranks are, and if their ranks fall too low, the Bawg becomes hostile towards them and sics the non-sentient Bawg lifeforms on them. The Bawg does not disclose to them what its standards are for ranks, so they have to make educated guesses, and they can't just kill or sabotage each other directly because apparently the Bawg doesn't like that, so they sometimes get you to be their mercenary/proxy. Fun stuff.

The story is as linear as it gets, and while you can make crit builds, damage deflect builds and DOT builds, and you can switch things up with different weapon types, accessories and modifiers, the combat always feels kinda the same, but I still find it pretty enjoyable. It's available on PC and there's an Android port, but I have no idea how you'd play this on Android and not hate it, because while I don't dislike the combat system, I do not see it being very fun on mobile. The game costs money up front so there's of course no insufferable F2P shenanigans like microtransactions or waiting 12 hours to build a building.
 
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Unending Powerhouse Match said:
It's like Don't Starve, but without the satanic imagery
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What part of Don't Starve did you find Satanic? I'm playing the single-player recently. Nothing out of the ordinary.

There is "dark magic", but I can't think of it as Satanic. It's more like insanity than anything. Being killed by dark creatures that come out of nowhere once you eat shrooms rings more of a bell on insanity than it does Satanism.
Maxwell is portrayed as the bad guy, but even he isn't Satanic or anything. Most he does is give some weird lines and machines.
He also appears in the ending as a miserable puppet stuck listening to the same song over and over. Absolute regret over his black magic. If anything, this part is more Christian than it is Satanic.

Can't say for the multiplayer since it's garbage and I stopped playing years ago.
I was also going to make a post here a while ago about the multiplayer but eh, can't really be bothered to discuss how cucked it's getting. The main thing is that they deleted a British hunter character over "cultural issues" then made literally all of their next characters either black women or demons. There was not a single white male added in more than 5 years.
This is why I don't play the multiplayer, along with the third worlder community and terrible balancing. Also Tencent.
 
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