https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6o4N1FT7CA
Someone’s voice got a notch more fabulous.
Resident Evil in my Killing Floor 2
Instead of playing more Bioshock I figured I’d pay a long overdue visit to Killing Floor 2, where I decided to play a custom map I got off the workshop forever ago. I didn’t even remember it until the map loaded. Needless to say I must have downloaded it while having Resident Evil on the brain.
The map uses models and textures from Resident Evil 4. Felt quite nice to frag some zeds (zombies) in a fitting atmosphere. My character is now a level 5 berzerker. My friends are light years ahead of me in leveling… It doesn’t really bother me, there’s too many games that require leveling. I’d rather let it happen and not worry about it.
Meanwhile… In Rapture
I’ve pressed onward through Bioshock Remastered, even made it to a point where the game became a horrid lagfest. Thankfully it was in just one area of the game and not the entire thing, though I would rather it didn’t.
If it’s anything I’ve learned about the Bioshock series it’s that 99% of the people you meet are crazy, wanting to kill you, or both.
This person is named Peach, and he ain’t no princess… He let me clobber him over and over again with my wrench. I don’t think he was supposed to do that, but considering how stupid the people in rapture are I’ll just say that he’s a fucking moron.
He sent me on a quest to find a camera and take pictures of splicers (basically the equivalent of meth addicts in this game) for scientific research, and in exchange he would let me into his little clubhouse. Then he made me put down all of my weapons minus the wrench and magical drug powers I’ve accumulated thus far. I murdered everyone and pressed forward, now I’m at a point where I can craft stuff. Now I’m understanding why so many Bioshock fans didn’t care for Infinite, they took out a few things from the first game (and I’m going to guess the second, haven’t played that one yet). Bioshock itself is fun, but I think I still like Infinite better. Though the story seems to follow a similar pattern.
The pro’s and con’s of Bioshock Remastered
I decided to check out the Bioshock Remaster, I’ve been putting it off long enough and figured a rainy day would be the right atmosphere to play a game about being entirely surrounded by drugged out residents in an underwater utopia gone to hell. I’m at the point where I have to kill the second Big Daddy, that’s about the point where my game started being a crashy mess in the original. So far I’ve compiled a list of what I like and dislike about the remaster:
Pro’s:
- Manual Saving instead of just relying on vitachambers.
- Better stability, no crashes thus far.
- Achievements.
- A museum was added to show off early concepts. (Originally only for people who purchased Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition for consoles).
- Challenge Rooms (Originally an exclusive for the PS3 version of Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition, but was later released for the XBox 360)
Con’s:
- Texturing seems too glossy in most areas, like it’s covered in vaseline. Only things the player notices sooner seem to have better texturing, like NPC clothing and consumables.
- Less configuration options compared to the original, requires tweaking in the ini. Not an entirely big deal but if you’re making a remastered version of a game it would be nice to have better graphics options…
- Still running on Unreal Engine 1.5… They couldn’t even bother to port it over to Unreal Engine 3 or 4.
- No surround sound option (can be fixed in a roundabout way).
- No mouse acceleration (tweakable in ini), mainly fixates on controller options and key binds.
- Game keeps launching in windowed mode for some reason.
- No borderless window option in 2016/2017.
I’m thankful I can actually play the game, however that isn’t going to stop me from pointing out how lazy the porting is. Usually when you do a remake on PC you add more features. Hell, Killing Floor runs on a modified version of Unreal Engine 1 and it has more features than this. While we’re at it I think Unreal Gold has more customization options than this remastered game. It’s like they took the special console edition, changed a few things, ported it over and called it good… Lazy as fuck.
Well, at least it was free. If they made me buy the remaster I probably would have waited for a big sale so I could get the challenge rooms. Other than that it seems pointless.
Thread to confirm that I didn’t die
I’ve been busy these last few days. Yesterday I came home from work and decided to do some dusting around the room. I dusted everything but the computer area, as that was cleaned off already. Eventually I’ll have to pull everything apart to do a deeper cleaning though like I did everything else. I enjoyed listening to some oldies while tidying up. I picked random shoutcast stations on my Roku and listened with my new wireless headphones that I purchased for the TV (to enjoy streaming music and quietly enjoy my programming while in bed). They’re a Sennheiser RS-120, basic but I like them.
It’s a good thing I decided to do some cleaning up too… I went out to lunch after work today to a new Japanese/Chinese/Korean restaurant, and my former work friend gave me some late birthday presents from last year. One was a miniature shopping cart, a jewelry box with a necklace inside, and a sign. Here are some pictures:
I decided to put the sign and the cart on the bookshelf. Fits most of my hot sauce collection quite nicely.
I decided to put the jewelry box next to my jewelry box because why not have some redundancy? I have a total of 4 jewelry boxes, and only one is full… Maybe on one of my days off I’ll sit down and sort out what should go between these two. See if I can properly fill it. 😛 Some might use this as an excuse to buy more jewelry, but I’m not so sure…
Spain is looking rather sepia this time of year.
After a couple days of dabbling with console emulators I’ve decided to return to a console port… I will say that I like Resident Evil 4, but the controls take some getting used to. Moving the mouse doesn’t turn your character in any particular direction, you have to use WASD at all times to move a certain way… It took a couple deaths for me to really get used to moving around like that, you definitely don’t want to stand in one spot while zombies try to tear you apart with explosions and pitchforks.
The game centers around Leon Kennedy, he’s like Dante from Devil May Cry minus the personality, demon/angel powers and sharp objects… Actually he’s not like Dante at all, he just looks like a less albino version of him.
That’s the RE6 version of him, but my point still stands. He’s fabulous.
Leon is a government agent tasked with rescuing the US president’s daughter, and the path left him to a part of Spain that suffers from a plague of depressing sepia.
I haven’t found her yet, but I’ve found plenty of other interesting things. In the RE games it’s important to observe your surroundings for clues, you don’t want to miss out on anything stating the obvious!
I just made it passed the point where I met a mysterious fabulous Spanish dude named Luis Sera. He was bound in a closet, then we were bound together. The locals haven’t been friendly, but one thing is clear… They’re into bondage. We managed to escape a local that had an axe to grind with us. I’m now at the point where I met this charming fellow:
From what I can tell he’s the local drug dealer, but he’s out of the usual stuff and has weapons/weapon upgrades instead. Weird controls aside, I think I like this game. I’m glad I have this version and not the first release. I haven’t looked into it but have heard it was a terrible port, if it’s anything like the DMC3 port for PC I may have dodged a bullet.
The new Mario game is looking really promising
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih323XXu_3w
Something about Mario being chased by the police and chilling with strippers is just… beautiful. One of these days I need to play GTA IV, and mod the fuck out of it.
Process of emulation: Getting everything dialed into Steam
My pursuit to turn my computer into the ultimate console has been going quite nicely. I’ve been adding each emulated game individually to Steam so I can launch them in Big Picture without having to manually select each game. I’ve also been setting up my Steam Controller to work with the emulators, from what I’ve read people really like the Steam Controller with emulators like Dolphin (Wii and Gamecube) and a bunch of others thanks to the extra buttons. Spyro works really well with it, the grips on the bottom of the controller are set to rotate the camera view as opposed to the left and right triggers. It makes the games feel more comfortable IMO.
So far I’ve only setup Spyro and Klonoa (the PSX and Wii versions) and plan to add more as I come across them. At some point I’ll have to copy off my old Playstation discs onto the drive, or turn them into ISO’s. Would be nice to play some Crash Bandicoot and a couple others. Once I have this setup I’ll do the same on my laptop. That should REALLY catch some people off guard when I take my lunch breaks. 😛 I’ve already been enjoying quite a bit of Super Mario.
Yesterday was therapeutic
Yesterday was nice. I had a short work day, came home and made some cherry blossom green tea with a plan to clean bedding. While doing that I decided to cook up a homemade bowl of miso ramen using dashi granules and the white miso paste I got the other day. Firstly, I used granules (which some would consider a sin) because I didn’t want to make an entire thing of soup stock, it’s ok in a pinch but I think it tastes better when prepared from scratch. Then I threw in some mirin, sake, soy sauce, the miso paste, wakame and baby portabella mushrooms. I didn’t think to take a picture but it turned out really nice, served it in a large ramen bowl and everything.
I also prepped dinner yesterday. I read about a brilliant idea to marinade steak in Chinese black bean sauce, so I started marinading early in the day so it would have a nice taste later at night. I also sliced up three colors of bell pepper, a small onion and threw in the remaining of the morning mushrooms. That all tasted good with the jasmine rice.
I’m surprised, the bean sauce gave the steak a nice dark flavor. Then I finished off the meal and had some sake before retiring to nice clean sheets. Definitely started off my weekend much nicer than last week. It was also kind of the sun to show up, I almost forgot what it looked like. 😛 I was gently woken by it today. Finally nice to have some weather during the day that isn’t completely freezing.
Nostalgic Feels in gaming and stomach churning
Motion sickness isn’t something I’ve had in a long time, not even after hours of playing an FPS while knocking back lots of alcoholic drinks… I think the last time I had felt sick during a game was when I was playing the original Doom for an entire day, sometime during all the custom wads I cycled through I suddenly had to lie down and hope I wouldn’t throw up… at least until yesterday when those unfond memories of holding back the urge of throwing up surfaced, and who knew it would be while playing the original Spyro?
I never had access to the game when I was younger, the closest I could get to it was a Playstation Pizza Hut demo disc. I played the hell out of Spyro and some other demos on the disc always hoping that someday I’d get the full thing, sadly that never happened until years and years later when I started to play with emulators. I found roms for the first trilogy and thought “awesome!”, and so I began playing for quite a bit actually. Then after awhile last night my stomach started to turn. I didn’t want to stop playing because I was so close to finishing the level and finding all the gems, so I pressed onward a bit longer and called it good when I rescued one last dragon.
I was kinda bummed, the game itself is a lot of fun… but I can’t seem to play it for very long like I can with other games. I tried again a bit ago after getting the Playstation emulator to work through screen so I could take screencaps, and once again I had to stop after a short while of play… which pisses me off because I found an annoying boss battle and didn’t want to quit.
I wanted to do a livestream of this at some point, but it looks like I’ll have to shelf the idea. I feel the need to experiment though, maybe if I play this distanced away from the TV in the living room… could that solve my problem? Or would the larger TV make it worse?