The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (7 August to 13 August)

[ZedClampet]

So yesterday I had the day to myself and it was raining and my new controller is messed up....SO, I spent the whole day having fun with trying to play Forza Horizon 5 with a keyboard type set-up, which I detailed in the last weekly thread.

The driving is a bit janky, but I decided to upload it for @Frag Maniac to see since he uses keyboard controls. Plus, I bet I drive just as janky with a controller. I've never actually watched one of my races until yesterday. By the way, I have to applaud Turn 10 with how they handle keyboard braking. Pump the brake fast enough and you get one long, smooth brake. I wasn't expecting that.

SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON AND SUBSCRIBE!!!!
(just kidding)

Sorry for the terrible video quality. I used the Xbox overlay for the first time. I need to see about changing the settings from "Awful" to something else.

 

[Frag Maniac]

That's pretty good actually for keyboard driving. I think most would consider for KB driving it's pretty smooth, not jerky.

As far as video quality goes, it's OK for a 1080p upload, but if your capture clips are 1080p, you get better results resizing to 2560x1440 before uploading. This makes YouTube use their highest quality VP9 processing, which takes a bit longer, but is worth it. The only exception is if your content gets a ton of views, at which YT deems it valuable ad space and automatically applies VP9.

You need to use more bitrate though when you resize to 1440p. I use Avidemux, and with it's built in Mpeg4 AVC (x264) codec, I configure it to Average Bitrate (Two Pass), with 30,000 kbit/s bitrate. The resizing is done via the Filters tab, then scroll down to Resize, double click on it, choose 2560x1440 Resize Dimensions, then for Resize Method, Lanczos 3 is sharpest. For Output Format I use mp4.

 

[DXCHASE]

Still on the mend from covid, pretty much 100% outside of some fatigue issues, wife and son doing good. Bought my son Stray as a gift for getting through covid. Covid also has led me to not having played a single game in a little over a week. I have to say its been a nice break because i felt i was hitting gaming burnout but now i dont know where i want to jump back in.

Played a little bit of Far Cry 6 for the free weekend a bit ago just to see where it lands in my new rig FPS wise, i beat FC6 back when it first came out, through ubisofts gamepass since i had a discount, but had FPS issues since i was running it with an 4790k. Gotta say its nice to stay roughly 90 and above with max settings and the HD texture pack.

 

[Zloth]

Sorry for the terrible video quality. I used the Xbox overlay for the first time. I need to see about changing the settings from "Awful" to something else.

Looked great to me! (At least after the first 15 seconds. I hate how YouTube forces the quality to be low at the start.) But what the frak is up with you going off-road?? Is there no penalty for tires going off the pavement? You were completely off at 2:03!

P.S. Could you use an electric car next time? Those old ICE engines make it hard to hear the music.

 

[ZedClampet]

But what the frak is up with you going off-road?? Is there no penalty for tires going off the pavement? You were completely off at 2:03!

There's no penalty for going off road as long as you still go through the checkpoints, which in this race are the yellow flags. You do lose significant traction.

There's no penalty in Motorsport either, but anywhere you would want to go off the track there are either rumble strips that slow you down or tire stacks that create absolute mayhem if you hit them.

Now Grid is another story. The very first qualifying lap I ran, I got the "Uh, you did not just do that," message and had the lap disqualified. Now during a race if you go off the road because you are a moron and can't drive or because another car rams you off the road, that's fine.

 

[ZedClampet]

Today is Guido's last day of summer vacation. It was truly an awesome summer. I retired and spent so much time with my son. I'm so lucky. Today we hit Raft hard, and I think we are headed to the final story island now. I may have died to the Motherload boss, but that's my only unintentional death so far.

I've also been fiddling with a solo Raft game, but I'm not intending to go to the end. I've been letting Guido handle building out the raft and everything, so I just want to try a couple of things in my own game.

So many games that we had hoped to play this summer got delayed. Glad we had V Rising, Raft and Forza Horizon 5. I think my favorite was V Rising. Of course, that's in early access so there is more to come there.

 

[Brian Boru]

I decided to upload it

Hmm, I think you drive a little better than me—probably that whole day training made the diff

Nicely done.

30,000 kbit/s

Just checking—typo?

 

[ZedClampet]

Not only did I finally win a race during The Trial, but I won all of them. Somehow beating actual people feels better than beating AI even though the AI is better.

One of the reasons I won is explained by this screenshot Guido took during the race:

Spoiler: Guido makes a turn

You can pick any vehicle as long as it's in the right group performance-wise, so Guido picked this truck and decorated it just for The Trial

 

[WoodenSaucer]

So yesterday I had the day to myself and it was raining and my new controller is messed up....SO, I spent the whole day having fun with trying to play Forza Horizon 5 with a keyboard type set-up, which I detailed in the last weekly thread.

The driving is a bit janky, but I decided to upload it for @Frag Maniac to see since he uses keyboard controls. Plus, I bet I drive just as janky with a controller. I've never actually watched one of my races until yesterday. By the way, I have to applaud Turn 10 with how they handle keyboard braking. Pump the brake fast enough and you get one long, smooth brake. I wasn't expecting that.

SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON AND SUBSCRIBE!!!!
(just kidding)

Sorry for the terrible video quality. I used the Xbox overlay for the first time. I need to see about changing the settings from "Awful" to something else.

Great job. I was disappointed that you didn't add a voiceover, though.

 

[Ryzengang]

I haven't been playing too much on PC lately as it has been terribly hot here the last week or so. Fortunately, this week looks substantially better on that front. I did sneak in another 2 hours or so of Final Fantasy VII which has been an enjoyable experience so far (roughly 5 hours in). I've mostly been sinking hours into Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition on my Switch. I'm having a blast with this game and I've put in nearly 20 hours in less than a week. I've already purchased the second game to play after I finish.

As a random aside, I got notified that this is my 2nd year anniversary on PC Gamer, which is crazy to think about. With the pandemic, the past two years have basically been a fever dream to me.

 

[ZedClampet]

I haven't been playing too much on PC lately as it has been terribly hot here the last week or so.

I keep forgetting the US is about the only place that uses air conditioning. It averages about 90 F (around 32 C) here in July and August. I would be beyond miserable, especially when it hovers around 100 for days on end. I have to keep my bedroom around 72 F (22 C) or I can't sleep.

 

[Zloth]

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk hit me with a really difficult fight. So I dumped it and played FF7 Remake all the way through. When I came back, I got through the difficult fight the very first time.

Soon after, there was an even more difficult fight. It's way too early to go back to FF7R in hard mode, so I mentioned it in the forums. Somebody asked me to record a video so they could give tips. Good idea! I popped back in, turned on the recorder, and promptly won the fight handily. Eeeesh.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I keep forgetting the US is about the only place that uses air conditioning. It averages about 90 F (around 32 C) here in July and August. I would be beyond miserable, especially when it hovers around 100 for days on end. I have to keep my bedroom around 72 F (22 C) or I can't sleep.

When I was younger, we never had air conditioning. I have no idea how we made it back then. For a little while as a young adult, I rented a small house that didn't have AC. I was only there during the summer months, and it was a hot summer. I used to have those old antique wooden dining chairs that were stained and varnished, and my hot, sweaty shirt would always stick to them and end up stained. It was awful.

 

[Pifanjr]

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk hit me with a really difficult fight. So I dumped it and played FF7 Remake all the way through. When I came back, I got through the difficult fight the very first time.

Soon after, there was an even more difficult fight. It's way too early to go back to FF7R in hard mode, so I mentioned it in the forums. Somebody asked me to record a video so they could give tips. Good idea! I popped back in, turned on the recorder, and promptly won the fight handily. Eeeesh.

Did you put the recording on the thread for whoever would stumble upon it looking for answers for the same fight?

 

[ZedClampet]

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk hit me with a really difficult fight. So I dumped it and played FF7 Remake all the way through. When I came back, I got through the difficult fight the very first time.

Soon after, there was an even more difficult fight. It's way too early to go back to FF7R in hard mode, so I mentioned it in the forums. Somebody asked me to record a video so they could give tips. Good idea! I popped back in, turned on the recorder, and promptly won the fight handily. Eeeesh.

These sorts of things happens to me so often that I consider them official strategies.

 

[ZedClampet]

I struggle to find the right difficulty to play on in Forza Horizon 5. There are 8 difficulties. The last 4 are Highly Skilled, Expert, Pro and Unbeatable. The problem is that there are now over 600 different vehicles in the game, and I like to change vehicles every coupe of races, but some of these vehicles just can't win Expert or higher races (at least I can't get them to win), but at Highly Skilled I win pretty much every race, so going from Highly Skilled to Expert is sort of like an all or nothing situation. I don't want to win all the races, and I don't want to lose all the races.

******************

Two products I wish existed are a controller that could utilize tilt steering like a phone. Some of my favorite racing games used to be on iphone and steering by tilting the phone back and forth was really fun.

The other would be a racing mouse where the left and right click were set up like triggers on a controller so you could use them for brake and throttle, and then the steering would be just moving the controller left and right.

 

[ZedClampet]

OT QUESTION: What was the first thing you ever coded? It's going to make a big difference whether you taught yourself or learned in a classroom setting--Hello World.

My first project was when I was about a freshman in high school creating a text based RPG like Dungeons and Dragons on an Atari computer using BASIC. I had some sort of instruction manual I was using. Had to save my work on the ever-reliable cassette tape player, Never actually finished it, but you could create your character and play for awhile. The "rooms" and encounters were randomly created from lists. There was no save game, and if you died you started over. It was a roguelike before Rogue (you can correct me, but I don't care).

So what was the first thing you coded?

 

[WoodenSaucer]

OT QUESTION: What was the first thing you ever coded? It's going to make a big difference whether you taught yourself or learned in a classroom setting--Hello World.

My first project was when I was about a freshman in high school creating a text based RPG like Dungeons and Dragons on an Atari computer using BASIC. I had some sort of instruction manual I was using. Had to save my work on the ever-reliable cassette tape player, Never actually finished it, but you could create your character and play for awhile. The "rooms" and encounters were randomly created from lists. There was no save game, and if you died you started over. It was a roguelike before Rogue (you can correct me, but I don't care).

So what was the first thing you coded?

Mine is similar to yours. When I was in 10th grade, in my Electricity class during some free time, there was a guy who would write very simple BASIC programs on the Apple IIe in the room. I watched him and thought it looked very easy. Later that year, we got a Commodore 64 for Christmas, and rather than playing games, I immediately went to work programming a text-based adventure game, similar to Zork, only with multiple choices instead of being able to just type anything in. I tried programming something like that much later on, and it wasn't easy at all to be able to parse random sentences.

Then about a year later, I decided to start programming a much bigger graphical adventure game similar to Questron. I used Assembly Language for the heavy lifting, and BASIC as the scripting language. I even got it officially Copyrighted, and I advertised it in the C64 magazine, called Compute!'s Gazette. I created a decent paper manual for it and freelance sold it for $10 a copy. I made about $100.

But it was after I was really far along in that game that I took my first programming class as a senior in high school. That's when I had to write my first "Hello world" program, and I already knew significantly more about programming than my teacher did. That teacher hated me so much and was so outwardly jealous of that.

 

[ZedClampet]

Welp, I've reached a point in Raft where I can't advance. We are headed toward what I assume is the final boss, but to get there you have to do this wild parkour section with spinning things all over the place that knock you off requiring you to restart. I suppose that eventually I might get it, but I surrendered. I told Guido that the only way I was getting to the boss was if he played on my computer and got me there, and then ended the play session for the night.

The other option is to try a controller. As I've mentioned before, I've lost a lot of coordination in my left hand. Normally that doesn't really matter that much, but intricate parkour is out of the question. A controller might help.

 

[Zloth]

Did you put the recording on the thread for whoever would stumble upon it looking for answers for the same fight?

Yep. For anyone who wants to watch the hour long battle, which mostly consists of me trying to figure out what to do next:

View: https://youtu.be/pi9qhTrIj-A?t=273

These sorts of things happens to me so often that I consider them official strategies.

"Sleep on it," as they say. Worked great for me for the final battle in Doom Eternal, too.

OT QUESTION: What was the first thing you ever coded? It's going to make a big difference whether you taught yourself or learned in a classroom setting--Hello World.

Taught Applesoft to myself using the Apple Reference Manual. My first program was probably:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

RUN

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I started another game of Halo: Reach, but the main thing I'm working on right now is Relicta. That game is a gem.

 

[Brian Boru]

racing mouse where the left and right click were set up like triggers on a controller

No idea here, but would a programmable mouse offer that? I guess make it a secondary mouse you only used for racing.

first thing you ever coded

Not coding like your effort, but I typed in a BASIC Connect Four game from a mag, and when it actually worked after inputting the errata from the following month's issue, I started changing simple things like color of disks and number or height of the columns.

First things I would have created from scratch would be some years later, Lotus 123 scripts and DOS batch files.

I used Assembly Language

So that's how you ended up like… well, you know
That's hard core man!

 

[ZedClampet]

No idea here, but would a programmable mouse offer that? I guess make it a secondary mouse you only used for racing.

The thing about the triggers on a controller, and there's a term for this I can't think of at the moment, is that you can press them with varying pressure and get varying results. Like on follow missions, you can adjust how fast you walk by how hard you press the triggers. In racing that's very important because if you just slam the brakes, you are going to slide, and if you slam down the throttle, your wheels are going to spin out. So I want the left and right click to be like triggers instead of only being on/off.

 

[Brian Boru]

there's a term for this I can't think of at the moment, is that you can press them with varying pressure and get varying results

The term for that is 'torture'.

With the amount of time you spend on it, pleasure you get from it, and apparent ability not to crash on every turn, why not go for a racing setup—cockpit, wheel, pedals, the works—on Black Friday?

 

[ZedClampet]

The term for that is 'torture'.

With the amount of time you spend on it, pleasure you get from it, and apparent ability not to crash on every turn, why not go for a racing setup—cockpit, wheel, pedals, the works—on Black Friday?

Maybe someday. I'd have to get a new desk, though. The one I'm using is literally 50 years old and has an accompanying bookshelf that sits on the back of it, but the way the front is designed, you couldn't attach a wheel to it, and I wouldn't want to anyway. It's in pristine shape and that would scratch the heck out of it.