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I went ahead with Black Mesa, but have yet to play it since it has been a busy week.

I never did finish the original Half-Life, so maybe this will inspire me to fill that gap!

The Steam Summer sale has begun!

https://store.steampowered.com/

I am half considering Doom: Eternal and Black Mesa (the Half-Life remake).  Anyone else eyeing up any games?

4th of July weekend coming up, woot!

I tried playing some of one of the Alien vs. Predator renditions that I have on Steam.  Of course, as a xenomorph, I lasted through the tutorial and about fifteen minutes until I died (rather cheaply, I thought).

So, on to some streaming stuff.  Since Hulu is streaming Predators, I thought that I would give it a watch.

It starts straight into the action.  The acting and action are consistently good in reference to Predator and Predator 2.  With exception of one scene where an ex-con is saying some pretty offensive stuff, it was a decent action flick. 

Anyone else seen it?

The action scene for last Friday's episode (June 25th) was on point!

That was better than some action MOVIES I have seen!

 

After being told that there are seven stages, you hit an eighth and are told it is the final nightmare.

You then get thrown into a ninth night of six stages in a row, the last two of which have randomly changing (living) blocks, random brimstone falling from the sky, and a boss chasing you.

The difficulty jumps dramatically even on the easy game play setting.  The amount of luck needed for the sixth part of the ninth nightmare is ridiculous.  It took me over 30 retries to finally beat the game, only to get the "bad" ending.

All fun is lost out of the game after the 7th stage.  I really cannot recommend the game after the amount of rage quit built up over the last two parts of the final stage.

I had the same thought process.  There is a huge part of the story line that deals with a guy cheating on his girlfriend.  That part of the story is kinda like a rail shooter, you do not get to directly make those decisions; the player is along for the ride on that part of the story.  However, discussions that you have with people, questions you do answer, and interactions in the Stray Sheep bar do make you think about relationships.  Just seeing how the main character, Vincent, interacts with his established relationship with Katherine vs the girl he unwittingly started a relationship with, Catherine, gives some serious consideration to how relationships change over time.

There was some actual thought put into both the puzzle game phase of the game and the relationship side of the story.  There is a part where the Catherine character tries to send naughty pictures to the protagonist; those are borderline NSFW, but I would not be playing video games at work anyway.

Anyone else played this?  I remember seeing it back on the PS3 and 360, noticed it on a Steam sale so got it.  It is actually a pretty decent puzzle game interspersed with a story and time talking to patrons in a bar between the nightmare puzzle stages...  It does have some mature topics about relationships, but seems fairly PG-13 to me.

I am currently to the last stage after about 9 hours of play time.  It is a different type of puzzle game than say, Portal, but it similarly makes you think of three dimensional space.  Some of the topics on relationships are deeper than first listen as well. 

Overall, I'd recommend!

It was June 2020, I had an old Voodoo 3 PCI card by 3dfx.  Since I found the driver CD-ROM for it, I was able to sell the two together for $99.99.  I guess that the good thing now is that my core i5 bottleneck and 60 hz monitor make needing a better graphics card a null point. 

@Grindspine "retro gamers snagged those for more than I thought they'd sell. " ---

I dont believe it... or didn't until i pulled up ebay. There's a listing for an all in wonder 9700 pro - boxed for 30 bucks less than I paid for mine when i bought it when it first came out... holy crap, used is over 100 bucks... thats nuts, we've all prolly thrown away thousands of dollars worth of old video cards...

I had an old PCI Voodoo 3 and an AGP nVidia 6800.  I got a few hundred for those two card on eBay last year.

In May of 2020, I paid $342 for an EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO Ultra 6 GB dual fan graphics card.

As of today, in May 2021, the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO Ultra 6GB card is listed on Newegg at $1240 and out of stock.

WHAT?!

My main PC has an RTX2060, but it is bottlenecked by my older Core i5.  My Ryzen-based gaming laptop with a GTX 1660 Super outperforms it.  I sold off several graphics cards from old builds, going back to PCI and AGP.  Retro gamers snagged those for more than I thought they'd sell.  I held onto my GTX 960 just in case though.  Since my RTX is bottlenecked, maybe I should ebay that off and reinstall my 960 for the time being.

You can play Metal Slug 3 on PS3; I think you can buy it off the PS store still.

I have an Xbox copy for the OG xbox.  I think that I actually bought that from you at one point.

Now they need an xbox 3 so people can ask where Two, 720, and series Y are.

I have only gotten to play it a bit so far.  It feels like a more modern Super C contra, very familiar to Metal Slug 3 as well.  I have not played deep enough to really get into the upgrades yet.

360 was fine.  Xbox One was often confusing vs xbox original.  Series X and Series S are just silly names.

Sure, Playstation 5 is not an original naming convention, but it is direct and makes sense.

Anyone else snag this in April's free games with Gold?

It is apparently Contra-style with an "uprising" mode that allows for perks to be bought with earned cash as you progress through the levels.

It is a solid series and essential to understand later story arcs in Agents of Shield.  It also crosses over quite a bit with Captain America: Winter Soldier.

I spent some time browsing the Playstation store last night.  Renee wants a lot of Sonic games.  She forgets that I bought the Sonic Collection on PS2 and on Steam, neither of which she ever plays.  I also bought a Genesis mini, which sees too little play time.

I am tempted to get Castlevania: Lament of Innocence in hopes that it looks better on the PS3 in wide screen than on the PS2.

I have several old GBA games that I would like to revisit, but do not because I would prefer to play them on an actual console and screen.  I may have to look into this one if you have it working stable now.

I guess I gotta load up my PS3 hard drive while I can!

Doesn't it need to be bigger to fill a bigger TV screen? 

...which begs the question, "Does size really matter?"



The PS5 is no larger than the upright Xbox 360 Slim (for which I see an ad at the top of this page), right?

No Switch here.

We just have PC, NES, SNES, NES Classic, SNES Classic, GameCube, GameBoy Advance, NDS, 3DS, PlayStation, PS2, PS3, PSP, Xbox, and 360.  The 3DS is the newest console I have.  I pretty much have stuck with PC, PS3, and 360 for the last several years.

Are they copying Nintendo's strategy of lowering supply to increase demand?

That looks awesome.. for, you know.. when I get a PS5, since I do not have a PS4.

The show pays a nice homage to the sitcom tropes of yesteryear, yet you can see glimpses of that reality cracking and having an Avengers MCU underneath.  So far it has been good enough to watch the first few episodes.

However, if you are considering paying for a year of Disney Plus.. WHY HAVEn't you done that for the Mandolorian?  Besides, the rest of the Avengers movies, the Star Wars movies, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Star Wars Rebels are all on Disney plus.  You know, they do have Frozen and Frozen II too. 

I have the PC version.  Even though I have an older Core i5 processor and 16 GB DDR3 RAM, the game runs very well without getting my graphics card fans to ramp up (RTX2060.. overkill for any game my processor can actually handle).

At 1920x1080, I have no issues with frame rate drops.

Yeah @BLUEVOODU it definitely has a Final Fantasy II / III SNES feel while still having a modern flare to the graphics.  I have seen a few reviews compare the fight system to Bravely Default more than Final Fantasy turn-based RPG games.  It is not much of a learning curve after learning that your first few rounds each fight are meant for experimenting to find enemy weaknesses and building your boost points.  The next few rounds are unleashing your boost points after breaking enemy defense.  It is just a touch more complex than traditional turn-based mechanics.  I will say that $60 is steep, but, you know, it goes on sale here and there too.

I am following Primrose as my primary character, although I have collected the other seven.  Her second chapter has a super frustrating boss fight.  I feel like a fair amount of level grinding can happen with this.  Each random encounter can take a while; strategies using character buffs are clearly more important by level 25 than in similar games.

I think that I will be getting many more hours out of this one!

Between the snow areas, the desert, and the beaches, anywhere in the game with sand or grainy ground is just graphically stunning!