I was going to write something tonight, but SOTR consumed my soul again this evening. I really need to pace myself, maybe I’ll do some Serious Sam tomorrow instead.
A Series Of Tombs
With the weather being cold today it felt nice sitting indoors, drinking a hot beverage, and playing games to keep warm. Shadow Of The Tomb Raider does a good job of making my fans spin much like the other two games in the trilogy.
I’ve also been wanting to play Tomb Raider 3 again, but every time I try to play it I run into one problem or another. During my last attempt I could only look left to right, and the forward button was the number two for some reason with there being no button to go backwards… and when I try to change the key bindings the game just crashes despite trying out different compatibility modes. For the hell of it I tried to run the game under Linux via Proton and surprisingly had better results (though the cutscenes never play properly). I was even able to run it with the proper widescreen patch at 1440p, making old Lara look less stretched out on the screen. Speaking of old Lara I didn’t know it was possible to mod the original game:
This person has a bunch of other mods on their YouTube channel that replace the regular Lara with other versions of her, as well as some other abominations. Definitely worth a look, I might even have to install some of them for my own personal enjoyment. 😛 Would probably be fun to stream/record too.
Forgive me wallet, for I have sinned.
I bit the bullet this morning and made my purchase. I figured that getting the entire game for $58 is better than paying full price for just the base game. I’ve already played a bit of it and my system handles it quite well with everything but tessellation turned on. I made it past the day of the dead festival, and now I’m saving it for a later date. Find something else to do for now…
4 Days Later
I’ve been really busy these last couple of days. A co-worker of mine wanted me to look at her husband’s two laptops to see if they could be fixed. I managed to factory reset the first one (and took pity on the poor bloke and installed Waterfox because no one should suffer with Microsoft Edge), and the second one I’m working on at the moment seems to have a bad hard drive in it. Both laptops seem to show signs of being dropped just by reading the hard disk information, with the latter one being the worst of the set. I’m going to recommend for him to upgrade both of his drives to SSD instead of the 5400 RPM drives that currently inhabit both systems, they’ll perform much faster AND won’t be as susceptible to large bumps and drops (and tell him POLITELY to take better care of his shit). :trollface:
Meanwhile at work, one of my co-workers told me that the new Tomb Raider has 1980’s Lara Croft, and when I asked him about it he meant Lara from the original game, then when I told him that came out in 1996 he said he thought the graphics looked “80”s like”. O_O He has now been demoted from nerd to digital dork. :trollface: I was entertained by his excuse of being “just a kid when it came out” to which I replied that I was only one year older than him… then it turned into a conversation about me not looking entirely ancient (despite having white hair). 😛
Speaking of Tomb Raider I did notice that its having quite a sale right now despite only being out for about a month. I’m still a bit on the fence in getting it, mainly because of my own time constraints and using Linux more lately, resulting in another game in an ever expanding library that I still need to sift through. Ohhhh but it is indeed a test.
Rats with guns?
Felt like playing a bit more Max Payne tonight. I’m playing it on the new Proton branch, now the game sees my correct graphics card as an RX Vega instead of the good ol ATi 2900XT. :trollface: I’m thinking of doing a serious playthrough, but that isn’t stopping me from playing in the dev console. I wanted to activate the special Easter egg that happens when you throw a grenade in the hole at the start of Chapter 2. Doing so will treat you to gun toting rats further in the level.
I only learned of this Easter Egg recently, can’t remember if I posted it or not but having rats suddenly pull guns out is quite a random display. It may not be Watermelons but it is just as memorable.
Sunday Evening Open Thread: I’m still a nerd edition
I worked on and rendered another video using the Linux version of Shotcut today. I don’t know what it is, but to me the Linux version performs better for me than the Windows version, which itself isn’t bad by any means, but to me it seemed even snappier under Linux. I won’t uninstall it from Windows just in case I need it under there (you never know), but I have a feeling I’ll be using it under Linux more. Hooray for progress! :meeseeks:
Other than that there wasn’t much else to my day. It was a nice warm morning, followed by large gusts of wind that brought fog and cold weather by the late afternoon. I sat inside drinking tea, getting my computer work done and trying to feel better. I reinstalled DOOM 2016 on my desktop to test it with the newest version of Proton, and I can say that I now have mouse movement, but it feels a bit janky… I know I could do some tricks to get it to work, and I probably will in the future. But for now I think I’ll hold off and see if newer versions of Proton will remedy the issue. I’ve already beat the game once, and I’m already replaying it under Mint on my laptop with flying colors. I have plenty of other games that need testing. :v:
Finally catching up!
We had a surprise heatwave today, too hot for me to even want to take a nap. I ended up taking my laptop outside and play tested Prey on my Linux install, and surprisingly it works quite decently.
Speaking of Linux gaming I finished my first Linux related video. I’m not sure when I’ll release it, but it will probably be at the beginning of November at the very latest, with others hopefully following suit. I had to do a reinstall of Shotcut, the version I installed via my package manager decided that it didn’t want to launch anymore for whatever reason, so I tested with their portable version and that runs like a peach. It even has all of the same codecs I have under the Windows version… I’m wondering if I had an older version installed? Which is strange because it did report back the same version as Windows… Ponderous. If that’s the case I may start doing more of my video editing under Linux instead of keeping Linux and Windows recordings separate, and using Windows Shotcut to edit Windows video and Linux Shotcut for… well you get the idea. It’s kind of funny though when I think about it; Years ago when I first installed Linux to participate in the Steam Linux beta I couldn’t find any decent software to edit videos and always had to rely on Premiere Pro, among other programs that always had me going back to Windows (like game recording software for example). Fast forward to now, and we have several robust video editors to choose from, there are a couple options for game recording, and more and more everyday software being available to use. It’s amazing how much of this has grown since my early adventures of using Linux as a regular day to day desktop. Now here I am editing audio/video without having to rely as much or at all on Windows or Adobe for it. It feels good, real good.
As I’ve stated before though I’m nowhere near ready to completely ditch Windows yet, but the less time I spend under it the happier I am. I like having options.
I was in need of a good laugh
It’s been awhile since I’ve checked in on The Ocelot Unit…
It would be funny if they also replaced all of Mother Base with Ocelot. All the way down to the platforms. :v:
In tonight’s episode: The part of Gordon Freeman will be played by Spyro The Dragon
It’s comforting to know that if I ever can’t make up my mind on playing Spyro The Dragon or Half Life we can now have the best of both worlds thanks to a mod:
I watched the video, and for the most part they did a good job getting the game mechanics from the original Spyro down to a T. Magic Nipples (the creator of the mod) will be releasing it on October 26th. I might have to install this and give it a go. :happy: