The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (17 July to 23 July)

[Colif]

I think I get why the rest of the Roller Coaster Tycoon games sucked after the first 2

First 2 written in assembly language, I can guess the later ones weren't.
Though i remember it was also because some of the later ones wouldn't let you go underground.
They may have had the love but not the skill.

 

[ZedClampet]

Crush the Castle was definitely one of the better flash games I've played.

What is the place to go to nowadays for free browser games? I know itch.io is pretty big, but there's so much crap on there and I've found it hard to filter that out.

The best browser games

A collection of great games you can play right in your browser.

www.pcgamer.com

https://www.crazygames.com/m

https://www.kongregate.com/m

https://www.arkadium.com/free-online-games/

Browser Games 2023: Best Free Browser Games Online

All browser games to play online for free. Play the best browser games directly in your browser, without download.

gameforge.com

 

[ZedClampet]

I think I get why the rest of the Roller Coaster Tycoon games sucked after the first 2

First 2 written in assembly language, I can guess the later ones weren't.
Though i remember it was also because some of the later ones wouldn't let you go underground.
They may have had the love but not the skill.

Third one was fine, but after that the major problem was that it was being run by Atari.

 

[ZedClampet]

I decided to play the demo for Nobody - The Turnaround. There was a lot of story at the beginning, and then I was answering questions on a bus that were shaping my character. Finally, the bus ride ended and it was time to actually play the game. This happened less than a second later:

Yes, I stepped off the bus and immediately got hit by a car.

Most rewarding gaming session ever.

 

[Brian Boru]

browser games

Assuming you create an account at the site, do browser games usually save your progress when you quit?

 

[ZedClampet]

No mas. I'm done. I'll continue to play Forza Horizon with my son, but I'm finished playing solo. The AI is intentionally infuriating, and I'm just not going to do it anymore.

 

[Brian Boru]

For Co-op and Skyrim fans:

https://www.pcgamer.com/co-op-skyrim-is-finally-real-and-works-almost-exactly-how-i-hoped/

 

[DXCHASE]

Reminiscing after looking at the PC Box collectors FB page on how my father threw out 10-15 PC boxes from my childhood and tried to pass it off that he had given them to me "he thought".

They were, from what i can remember: Riven, Myst MK3, Hunter Hunted, General R. E. Lee Civil War Generals, Risk, Timelapse, Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo, The Chex Mix game (if anyone remembers that).

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I think I get why the rest of the Roller Coaster Tycoon games sucked after the first 2

First 2 written in assembly language, I can guess the later ones weren't.
Though i remember it was also because some of the later ones wouldn't let you go underground.
They may have had the love but not the skill.

I don't think Assembly Language is nearly as important as it used to be back in the day, other than for low-level OS/Kernel stuff. Even Unreal Engine is written in C++. A lower level language like C can compile down to be about as efficient as Assy. Most hardware drivers are written in C, and you can't get much more bare metal than drivers.

 

[Pifanjr]

The best browser games

A collection of great games you can play right in your browser.

www.pcgamer.com

https://www.crazygames.com/m

https://www.kongregate.com/m

https://www.arkadium.com/free-online-games/

Browser Games 2023: Best Free Browser Games Online

All browser games to play online for free. Play the best browser games directly in your browser, without download.

gameforge.com

Thanks! Crazygames and Kongregate are exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for, though less curated than I'd hoped. A lot of the other ones are multiplayer games, which I don't really care for, at least not right now.

Assuming you create an account at the site, do browser games usually save your progress when you quit?

I think Flash games could use cookies to save your progress, so you didn't even need an account.

 

[Colif]

I don't think Assembly Language is nearly as important as it used to be back in the day, other than for low-level OS/Kernel stuff. Even Unreal Engine is written in C++. A lower level language like C can compile down to be about as efficient as Assy. Most hardware drivers are written in C, and you can't get much more bare metal than drivers.

Some things have more access than drivers do to the CPU. Apart from the kernel which requires it, stupid idiotic Vanguard (Valorant's anti cheat) has ring 0 access, more than any driver does. It doesn't deserve that much access and if it wasn't needed to play silly game, I would count it as a virus. It causes lots of errors on PC. It thinks it has the right to close other programs. And its not smart to have 2 anti cheat engines on same PC as they don't like each other.

I wouldn't want to write a modern game in assembly anyway.

 

[Brian Boru]

I don't think Assembly Language is nearly as important as it used to be back in the day

An expert ancient developer and educator I listen to on YT always says the same, that speed of writing and maintaining the code trumps speed of execution every time, these days—hardware is just so much faster now that speed of execution is of no practical value in almost all cases.

I think Flash games could use cookies

I think you're correct on that—but I wonder how is saving handled, now that Flash is dead.

Vanguard (Valorant's anti cheat) has ring 0 access

Really? I don't recall seeing that in Valorant's marketing—strange, they would've definitely highlighted it as a big feature…

How does this compare with other malware like SecuROM and Denuvo etc?

 

[WoodenSaucer]

An expert ancient developer and educator I listen to on YT always says the same, that speed of writing and maintaining the code trumps speed of execution every time, these days—hardware is just so much faster now that speed of execution is of no practical value in almost all cases.

Yeah, that's a big part of it. Hardware is fast these days. Another part is that we have better low-level languages than they used to use a long time ago. When I used to program on the Commodore 64, Assembly Language was extremely important. The only other viable option was their version of BASIC, which was slow as molasses. I used to use BASIC as the scripting language, but call Assy routines for things that needed to run fast, like graphics. That's basically what is done these days, only in a different way. We can use game engines that were created in C++ or C and have bindings to a simpler scripting language, like Python, or even something like JavaScript in some cases. You can even use JavaScript for Windows UWP apps.

 

[Pifanjr]

I think you're correct on that—but I wonder how is saving handled, now that Flash is dead.

Either cookies or local storage, whichever the developer prefers.

 

[Colif]

I don't have any problems with the other anti cheats as they don't think that they own the PC they installed on.
VGK.sys AKA Vanguard can stop other programs from running.
It used to conflict with Bdaisy (Easy anti cheat)

I only know of it as it causes BSOD and I answer a lot of BSOD posts on Tom's Hardware. I will be happy when Valorant goes away.

 

[Frag Maniac]

I decided to play the demo for Nobody - The Turnaround. There was a lot of story at the beginning, and then I was answering questions on a bus that were shaping my character. Finally, the bus ride ended and it was time to actually play the game. This happened less than a second later:

Yes, I stepped off the bus and immediately got hit by a car.

Most rewarding gaming session ever.

If Nobody the game doesn't work out for you, try the movie called Nobody starring Bob Odenkirk, very good film that took me by surprise.

I would describe it as a sort of comical version of John Wick.

 

[ZedClampet]

We've been playing another Phasmophobia-like called Forewarned that has an ancient Egyptian theme. It's a good change of pace, but I have no idea what is going on. We were supposed to read about 15 pages of text to figure out how to play, and I fell asleep on page 2. But I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

 

[Zloth]

Tooooo hot for video games! Arrrg! (Well, energy demanding ones, anyway.)

On the video clipping front, a topic from last week....

You can clip a video after posting it to YouTube. It's a little hard to use (you must preview to save!), but the real killer is that YouTube takes a ton of time before it does it. I uploaded one last night then clipped it while it was still processing the HD portion. It's been a day and the low-def update still hasn't finished! The high-def of the original video never did get done.

What does work well is the free ffmpeg program. It's a command line program that can do tons of things, thus the instructions are... well... way bigger than Forewarned's, that's for sure. If you're doing simple things, though, you can easily do a little searching and find the command line you need. For cropping:

"D:\Program Files\FFMpeg\bin\ffmpeg" -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:01:18 -i %1 -c copy output.mp4

The first is where I've got ffmpeg on my computer.
-ss 00:00:00 is where to start the part of the video you want to keep (in this case, the very beginning)
-to 00:01:18 is where you want to end the video
-i %1 should be -i inpuname.mp4, but I stuck this in a batch file so I could just drop my video on the .bat to crop it.
-c copy tells it to copy the timespan out
output.mp4 is just the name of the file to make.

That will crop a big video very quickly - just a few seconds for a 10 minute video!

 

[Frag Maniac]

We were supposed to read about 15 pages of text to figure out how to play, and I fell asleep on page 2.

So you're practicing to be a senior like me then!

 

[DXCHASE]

Broke my blue yeti mic today, knocked it right off my table because i forgot i moved it and it landed perfectly between my subwoofer and the desk to break the usb part. I tried to fix it and i think i made it worse, i got it like 2 years ago and never registered it for an RMA or anything, so. I really loved the mic.

 

[DXCHASE]

If Nobody the game doesn't work out for you, try the movie called Nobody starring Bob Odenkirk, very good film that took me by surprise.

I would describe it as a sort of comical version of John Wick.

Great movie, the bus scene is the best.

 

[Brian Boru]

Co-op fans, a few mentioned here:

https://www.pcgamer.com/5-pc-games-that-should-be-way-more-popular-than-they-are/