Gaming

Aww! Does doggy want a stroke under the chin?



Erm. Maybe not!



I guess I'm not a doggy person.
Sooo, where are the cats?

Charlotte wrote:

of course not! You have to wash your hands (or gloves) first! You've been throwing poo with those, haven't you!?

Funny you should say that because not long after the doggy encounter I did indeed have a good wash when I found a bathing area. Real life and gaming do converge sometimes.
And it is one of those games that often tries to be too realistic. You HAVE TO eat at various times (but not too much because that makes you slow and clumsy) and if you don't sleep enough you get visibly weary. Also, in an attempt to offer realistic consequences, they limit your ability to save, which is mildly annoying. I failed to steal a horse the other day and am now stuck with long walks and being over-encumbered.


I recently noticed that Guild Wars 2 is available on GeforceNow so I'm tempted to try it without the chore of a chunky download/installation. Then again, it is one of those jumping crowd games, isn't it?
But it is annoying when games suddenly become free. These days I deliberately hold off from buying some games just in case they appear on Epic next week.

And speaking of that, from tomorrow they're offering Watch Dogs (almost bought that once) AND The Stanley Parable!

Charlotte wrote:

what does this GeforceNow actually entail anyway? Howsitwork?

'Tis one of those cloud gaming things. Instead of playing the game on your PC, you're actually playing it on their remote servers and streaming the audio and video back to your own device (PC, phone, shield TV thingy, etc.) via their client/launcher.
This is good for me cos their servers have much better specs than my own PC with its measly 5-year-old IntelHD chips and I can therefore play stuff like Kingdom Come, Assassins Creed: Syndicate and that Black Desert thing, all of which are waaay beyond what I could normally run. Plus, because the games are never installed locally, it doesn't eat up your hard drive.

The downside is that you do need decent, stable Internet, from my experience at least 20mb/s, maybe 30-40 if you want even better quality. And another downside is that they don't really have enough supported games and the greedy publishers, eager for an extra bit of cash, keep pulling their games from the service.

Up until about 18 months ago I was still using that 20 year old Windows XP machine!

Since then I "up"graded to one of those second-hand, refurbished office PCs that are all over Amazon. Unfortunately the flimsy, un-upgradable power supplies make it hard to get a graphics card without risking explosions.
I think there is one low-profile model that I could get but it would definitely push the PSU to unhealthy limits so I'm not really considering it.

But even without a graphics card it runs ArtRage at decent resolutions and most games from 5+ years ago can function at lower settings so it'll do.

Any games after that and I have to look elsewhere, hence my interest in cloud thingamies.
Oh, and one other downside of GeforceNow, I think they've now sold out of the paid membership tier so you'll be stuck with the free service (which I use.) At normal times you usually have to wait in a queue behind paying customers but after midnight you can get on straight away.