Tomb Raider

A Series Of Tombs

by

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.

4 Days Later

by

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.

Testing both Tomb Raider Reboots under Mint 18.3

by

I took the liberty of installing Tomb Raider and Rise Of The Tomb Raider under Mint to see how well they perform (if at all) on my hardware. The good news is that the programs actually run AND offer a nice framerate even with eyecandy turned up.

This is my overall score on ROTT with Ultra settings:

Now for the previous game:

There’s this weird glitch that won’t let me use TressFX even though it’s selected, but other than that I seem to be getting good performance on both games thus far. I’ll be trying other games too, but wanted to start with some of the most graphically demanding.I do say I also like the option of choosing which display that I want to play the game on before launching, that and the introduction of Vulkan as an optional mode to run ROTT in (what I used for the benchmark).

Getting these to run in Big Picture mode with the Steam Controller was also a therapeutic experience. It felt no different than when I played these titles in Windows while chilling in bed with my favorite controller.

Gaming under Linux still has some catching up to do, but every time I look into gaming under it the quality improves all the time. My library is definitely much larger than it used to be; I still remember when I only had a handful of Gold Source games and not much else, when TF2 introduced Tux, the first screenshots of Left 4 Dead 2 on a Linux desktop, and other companies like Croteam, 2K and others releasing their ports as well. It’s good to see more and more companies and indie developers look into different OS’s and bring some competition into the fray, and it’s amazing to see Open Source drivers arrive at a point where they are performing better than the proprietary ones thanks to AMD. Ever since reinstalling I’ve only gone over to Windows to play something that won’t run natively (usually of the Metal Gear or Platinum persuasion), but other than that my business has been conducted under Linux mostly during the week days.

Revisiting the old Tomb Raiders.

by

I’ve been toying with the idea of recording some classic Tomb Raider sessions (2 through 5), and the possibility of streaming them on Twitch and YouTube. I do seem to have issues with the classic versions and OBS, since they use an earlier version of Direct3D (pre directX 9) I have no choice but to record the entire desktop. I’ve experimented a bit with recording all of the desktop and it doesn’t seem to take much power. There is still streaming it to my laptop and then streaming it publicly from there as a possible solution.

Another problem I notice is that on a vanilla setup on any of those games is being unable to run them on any resolution above 1080p. The game setups give me the option to run at 1440p but they fail every time they launch. I would think someone by now would have come up with a workaround, but it’ll take more research. I’ve already installed the multipatch, though that doesn’t seem to solve the problem. I don’t mind playing at a lower resolution, but if there is an option out there that would allow me to play in my native resolution I’d happily welcome it. :happy:

Ryzen up to the challenge

by

I’m happy to say my new build has passed with flying colors, literally:

I’ve been quite happy with the setup so far. I’m still running at stock at the moment, everything has been running stable with only a couple Windows 10 quirks that doing a couple regedits can easily fix. I’ve already done some benchmarking in 3DMark and a couple Tomb Raider games. Here are my results with both running on the highest settings with Tessellation disabled:

I’ve run 3DMark, but for whatever reason it doesn’t recognize my graphics driver (currently 18.4.1 non beta), will try to run more tests at a later date. I tested Wolfenstein II since it was designed with Ryzen and Radeon in mind, and I can say it runs on Uber settings above 100FPS! :meeseeks: Whereas before it stayed in the 60 FPS range on high, definitely happy with the results. I can’t wait to see how this thing handles large video rendering projects! :happy:

My next goal is to purchase an external Blu-Ray burner, for backing up data (and experimenting with PS3 emulation) but that isn’t a requirement at this time. I’m going to try and take a break from spending lots of money and only save it for the small stuff. As it is I’m coming back up on renewing my webdomain. :rick:

All aboard the nostalgiagasm train

by

I’ve read more exciting news today! First, for some odd reason the newly remastered Crash Bandicoot will be coming out to PC July 10th.

Funny timing, as I’ve been contemplating getting out my Crash Bandicoot CD’s to play in an emulator (even though I could use my PS3 to play them), and comes as a surprise to me as that has always been a Playstation Exclusive. Of course I’m not going to complain, I’m just hoping it’ll be a good port. This was probably one of my favorite platforms when I was growing up. In fact this and Tomb Raider were probably my most played games during that particular period. It would be funny if that also got a remaster… oh wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-21TCbJF3g

Tomb Raider 1 looks the most impressive to me. Tomb Raider 2 not so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuo3BCY91wo

Although I’ve had issues running it and Tomb Raider 3 on my newer hardware, so at least there’s a chance of me being able to play them again and maybe even stream them., which I already had planned for Tomb Raider 1 after I’ve patched it recently to run natively in Windows. Either way, between these and the soon to be released remasters of Devil May Cry I’m pretty stoked.

Tomb Raider Barbie is best Barbie

by

My fellow Tomb Raiders! There is now a Tomb Raiding Barbie, much wow.

Look at that muscle definition, articulating arms and wrist, that look of blank focus. I never thought I’d see the day, if I were much younger I would have had this for my collection. Probably would have stacked all 47 of my other Barbie’s and 3 Ken’s into some tomb shape and let Lara fight it out with my other toys.

Yes, I had Barbies. I was one of those odd kids that played with actual toys when I wasn’t slaughtering demons on Phobos. :zorak:

Condensed version of the stream is up.

by

Didn’t record anything during lunch today, which was just as well… I played Mario World 2 as Mario, and confirmed to myself that I was really really out of practice. 😛

But instead I edited my video footage from yesterday’s stream to give you guys an abridged version so you don’t have to sit through almost two hours of Lara finding Scion swag, and lots of dying…

What I’ve been busy with

by

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to setup OBS Studio on my laptop. What’s really strange is that even if I maintain my gameplay above 60 FPS my output is below 30 even when specified at 60. I thought something was up with the NVidia codec, so I upgraded to the latest driver.

That was my first mistake…

After that I ran OBS Studio and the graphics card wanted to eject itself, then if I did anything else that would utilize my GPU the system would lock up solid. So I tried going back to the version before it, no dice. Then a couple restarts later Windows decided to put in it’s own driver and prompted me to do another restart. I restarted and got stuck in an infinite load cycle. After running System Restore everything was back to normal (even though Windows said it failed, gotta love Microsoft’s consistency in being totally accurate!). Then tried to install/uninstall my drivers only to find I couldn’t. After some dicking around I got it to install, but I had to use the device manager instead of NVidia’s installer, fabu…

After more testing I confirmed that OBS Studio for whatever reason sucks on my laptop. Meanwhile Classic OBS runs just peachy. So I guess if I record anything I’ll have to use Classic instead of Studio, which isn’t that big of a deal to me TBH. I just wanted to have OBS Studio on both systems for the sake of consistency. But NVENC works fine on Classic.

I’ve been playing with the idea of recording my gameplay during lunch (when I can) and turning it into vlogs. Maybe about why I played that particular game, what I like/hate about it, what I had for lunch, what form of insanity unfolded to make me play such a thing, food, etc.

Speaking of YouTubing, I did another Classic Tomb Raider Stream earlier this evening.

I have a local copy to go through in my spare time, as I’m sure there are a few highlights I can pinpoint within that long run of film, or I would at least HOPE there would be something in over an hour and a half’s worth of footage. 😛