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

Thanks for the offer Trevor ... once I get the sound figured out in the HT, I might PM you and get your thoughts ... At the moment the HT is on hold because I’m trying to do too many things at once. It’s one of the reasons I updated the family room system ...

Our family room now has a very nice 5.1 system with a top rate 77” screen (to get us though Covid). My wife is working on finding a sectional which hopefully, if I get any say, will be no more then 8 to 10’ (1.3x and 1.6x) from the screen.

Are you already completely roughed in and walls closed?

Sort of. The wall design I went with for isolation was clips and resilient channel. Over that 5/8 strandboard and a 2 layer 5/8 dry wall/green glue sandwich. I stopped the contractor from finishing it after the strand board was put up because it was not being done right. So ... I figure before taking down the standboard I should use the opportunity to test out the sound layout. That way I can tweak/change any wiring/layout issues.

Nice! Well, here if you want help.

Cyberpunk 2077 came out today on Steam, so I put a few hours in getting my character off the ground. Since I have a last-gen GPU (RTX 2060 Super), I'm only running at 1080P, and ray tracing not enabled. It still looks gorgeous. At first I was playing without HDR since I didn't have it turned on in Windows. It looked very good, but after realizing it wasn't on and switching it over, the difference was staggering. It really makes the environments pop a lot more, and a cyberpunk city is the perfect showcase for HDR. Even without ray traced reflections, as well as a lot of other graphical elements turned down or off, and merely running at 1080P, I'm impressed with the detail in the graphics. As smooth as it's running, I'll probably experiment with some higher settings, but I have no illusions about being able to run it at 4K. If I want to run it with maxed out settings at 4K, I may be waiting a GPU generation or two. At least I'm deeply satisfied with how it looks already, so I don't feel that pressure to upgrade yet.

The game itself seems to have a lot of potential, and I'm taking my time with it. I don't have a good handle on how to spend my attribute and perk points yet, so I'm letting those accumulate as I level up. It will also take a while to have meaningful cash to spend for the fun upgrades. I've been saving often after hearing of how glitchy the version was that was sent out for reviews, but so far I haven't encountered any noticeable glitches with the final release. The one thing that's getting under my skin a little is how much I'm being pushed along the main narrative so far, and how many cutscenes that entails. I look forward to experiencing the more open world aspect after I take care of more of the initial basic story.

If you have the hardware to run it, it's certainly worth looking into.

Pumping a lot of hours into Cyberpunk 2077. Bejeweled 3 is feeling neglected. There has been the occasional glitchy behavior, but it's still not the nightmare some people are having. I'm sure it helps that my hardware is fairly new. I am actually running it at 4K with DLSS, but of course ray tracing is off. Even at 1080P I can't have ray tracing on and have acceptable frame rates. The game looks amazing even without ray tracing. On one hand, it's nice that years down the road people will be able to get more out of the engine, but on the other hand, I want to run it at its prettiest RIGHT NOW.

They did a really good job making it feel like a real city with tons of life in it. Sure, most of the interaction with random NPCs is hollow, but you have enough with the characters that relate to your quests. You can tell they spent 7 years making it. It's a huge world, and there are so many changes of scenery. I don't know how many cities they pulled from for inspiration, but the LA vibe came across strong when I first started. One time I was a passenger in a car, and we drove by what looked like the Shake Shack I went to with my friend I went to visit in California, and then I saw the sign, "BD Shack." Speaking of being a passenger in a car, you can skip ahead in those drives if you want, but I never do because I like just looking at all of the scenery as you go along. It's a very satisfying level of detail.

The game is a love letter to video games. The developers obviously love the Bethesda games, and Grand Theft Auto, and one of the missions had an aspect that was a major shout-out to Portal. I mentioned Crackdown recently, and a good part of the action feels like it was drawing directly from that, since you're able to engage gangs on the streets, and as you accumulate your cybernetic implants, the trajectory toward superhuman feels similar. It's just taking place in a much richer world. It's like they took everything they loved about all of the games they play and put it into a glorious neon + Mad Max stew.

I'm up to over 520 million in Diamond Mine on Bejeweled 3, and over 3 hours on the clock. I'm just putting in a little time every day to keep it going and to not get slow at the game. My sister hates me.

I've also been playing a bit of Pinball FX3. I've always been a sucker for pinball, but I hadn't put in a lot of time on the new version. So far I'm just trying a lot of different tables, but I'm not mastering any of them.

My best friend also bought me Beat Saber for my birthday, which is a VR rhythm game. It might just be that I'm out of shape, but it feels like as good of a workout as Dance Dance Revolution gave me back in the day, though with more of a workout for your arms. I'm embarrassed how much it's making me sweat. I'll also never be coordinated enough to get to Expert level. I'll stick with Normal and still fail out of certain songs. I'd say it's my second favorite VR game after Half-Life: Alyx so far.

One issue that has come up on my PC is that occasionally performance will drop to a crawl and I'll miss a lot of frames. It doesn't matter what game it is. It can be as simple as Bejeweled 3 or as demanding as Cyberpunk 2077. It's the most frustrating in Beat Saber where timing matters so much. I'll try performing a clean installation of video drivers and go from there. Not sure what changed when it started happening.

Yay, the clean installation seems to have solved it. I love when the first thing you try works.

I was really impressed with the design of the spaces in Cyberpunk 2077, but I know nothing about architecture, so it was nice to see an actual architect review this aspect of the game and confirm that it's not all an illusion of understanding.

An Architect Reviews: Cyberpunk 2077's Night City

What's funny is the super-rich person's apartment he points out that you can see out of your character's crappy apartment is one you apparently end up with after one of the possible game endings. I just happened to watch a video for how to get to the "secret mansion" after the architect's video. While I've gotten to three or maybe four of the possible endings, I haven't yet gotten to that one. Nice, cruel placement of that swanky apartment, CD Projekt Red.