Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler What video games are you playing tonight?

THAT is a gorgeous piece of hardware engineering.

Did you see the first day Xbox smoking vids. They had to release a statement saying do not blow your vapes into the bottom of the consoles!!!

Thats so funny bendo. I remember just blowing in the NES cartridges to get them to stop freezing...man I miss legend of Zelda!

great video! that things is built to absorb some heat!!!

Legend of Zelda. Best game ever.

I bought a gameboy advance like 15 years ago just so I could replay legend of Zelda on it.

Truly a classic.

Yeah, blowing on the cartridge to keep it from frame freezing. It was part of the experience.

And in case you were curious, the same guy posted his PS5 teardown:

I Took Apart The PS5...And It Surprised Me

I'm trying to get a lot out of the $1 first month price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, so I downloaded The Outer Worlds and Gears 5. The Outer Worlds has potential for me since it's a single-player open world RPG with a ton of character and equipment upgrades. On the other hand, trying to put in the hours in less than a month might stress me out. Ha ha. Gears 5 has satisfying action gameplay that's easy to get into, but I'm not very determined anymore with action games, so I doubt I'll get far. After I played them for a little bit, I took advantage of the Series X's backwards compatibility and fired up Burnout: Revenge and Crackdown, two of my favorite Xbox 360 games. They loaded up nice and fast and seemed to work just fine. They're games well worth revisiting. Crackdown's sequels didn't get any love, unfortunately. It was too bad they couldn't seem to recapture what made the original so fun. As for Burnout, I don't know why that franchise went away. It would be nice if they would revive it. One of the game modes is intentionally crashing and causing as much of a pile-up as possible, with your score being how much money's worth of damage you can do. Who doesn't love that?

BRAG ALERT. I've been playing a lot of Bejeweled 3 again just to have something to do while listening to music. Diamond Mine is my game mode of choice. It was always the most fun for me. Back when I was first playing it, I topped out at a score of 12 million, which I thought was fantastic, since it was higher than anyone else I knew, and you only have to get 750k to earn the Platinum badge for that mode. Then I stopped playing, and my sister really picked it up... and she started decimating my score, ending up with 104 million in one game. I figured she was too fast at this point, so I wasn't motivated to get back into the game on a competitive level. When I did start playing again, it really was just to occupy my hands while enjoying music, but then I started to beat my previous score by a little bit. I got 15 million a couple of times, then 23 million a couple of times, but between those and since then I've had long stretches of just a couple million in a game.

There haven't been any updates to the game in forever, so I don't know why the current game I'm playing is different, but I'm currently at 107 million, and I have 38 minutes on the clock. For those unfamiliar, you start out with 90 seconds on the clock, and you earn more time by digging down to lower levels through the gem matching. You earn 30 seconds if you clear to the necessary depth, or 90 seconds if you clear the entire screen. As you may guess, getting the 90 second bonuses are harder to achieve, so you basically want to clear each level within 30 seconds to keep beating the clock. I doubt I've ever had more than 15 minutes on the clock, and that probably would have only been once, if I ever got that high. I know I've been over 10, but I can't say for sure what my previous record for peak time was. In this game, again I don't know why, but I'm still trending up in my time. I still have the stretches where I lose around 5 minutes, but then I build it back up again. At my peak, I've hit 39 minutes, so my current 38 is close to my new record.

The top player on Xbox Live's leaderboard for the Xbox 360 version is sitting at well over 100 million. I want to say 137 million, or maybe 173 million? I'm too lazy to look again at the moment. That's a more impressive feat, I think, if they were indeed using a normal controller and hadn't figured out a way to use a mouse with it. People on console controllers are always going to be at a disadvantage with speed on games like this. I'm not really sure what the worldwide high score on the PC is, but I thought I had found a video on YouTube at one point that was into the 300 million range. I can't find it now. So it's my goal to at least get that high. Right now I can't see not continuing indefinitely, which is most likely jinxing me. It's going to take a lot more hours of playing, but hey, there's always plenty of music to listen to.

The only bad thing is how your hand feels like garbage when putting in multiple hours in a session. The big reason my sister stopped playing is because she pretty much injured her hand from playing too much.

Cool Glad you managed to snag one of the new consoles.
Supposedly thousands have been gotten by scalpers. One I saw said 3500 of the PS5s were gotten by a group in the U.K. Whom turned around and said they are like a Robinhood group protecting them selves from despair, and not having a workless {COVID}Christmas. By preventing normal people getting an affordable unit?

Saw on Linus that the XBOX is also going to be available through a subscription addon to the the Game Pass Ultimate Like most ISP providers with Laptops. Maybe the only way for some non Bots to get one before they become accessible to the masses.

Haven't played any Bejeweled type in forever keep up the crazy scores.

The scalpers and bots are a real nightmare to have combined with the preference for online sales due to the pandemic. I lucked out getting the Xbox Series X on the first preorder day. At first I was trying Best Buy and Gamestop with no luck before having the bright idea of hopping over to Microsoft's site. At least I could start the ordering process there, as opposed to getting nowhere on the other sites. There were a lot of timed-out attempts before the order finally went through. I never even tried with the PS5 after missing their initial preorder. I also tried to get an RTX 3080 video card when they went up for sale, but no such luck because of the limited supply+bot combo. I'm kind of glad it didn't work out, since I'll probably want a 3080 Ti when those come out.

The only positive spin I can give for the people who haven't been able to snag a new console is there will be more games to play when supply finally catches up to demand. While there are a ton of games in the store, thanks to how backwards-compatible the Xbox Series is, only a small percentage are optimized for the Series X/S. People who are behind a couple of generations could get a lot out of it, but for me, most stuff on Xbox I would want to play I already have on Steam, so it will come down to exclusives.

As far as Bejeweled 3, I bragged too soon. I'm up to 132 million and 62 minutes on the clock. I never thought I'd see over an hour on the clock. I seriously don't know what changed in my playing to enable this. I don't want to question it too much and change my luck.

Just messed with an Xbox series X on a Denon 3700 to a 4K display for a install. What a pain to get it working.

Finally got 4K signal to pass but no hdr support. Have to do some digging and go back. Pain!