So dragon quest 11 being for steam made me realize that i don’t actually ever want a ps4. Problem with me becoming a pc gamer is that I have a laptop with integrated graphics. Can I play…anything? Can I play an unreal 4 game at like 20-30fps and sub-720p resolution? Does more ram help?
do you feel like replacing the laptop anytime soon? Ice Lake should be the first good bump to iGPUs in a while (the standard four-core low power configuration should be about half as good as a PS4’s GPU)
No, it’s three months old. It’s a kaby lake 
I wish I had made this decision before getting it.
oh, well. Kaby Lake-R was the first good bump to CPUs in a while, but the GPUs are pretty old now (they haven’t really gotten better since broadwell).
You can grab the FfXV benchtest to see. Probably a couple of Unreal engine benchtests out there.
I had kickstarted Aegis Defenders so I finally picked it up on Switch after the usual download-key nonsense. I played it on Hard difficulty up to the first “red zone” over the weekend (which crushed me repeatedly). I think it’s basically smart and sound as a game design. The exploration sections are there to tutorialize new mechanics, and to be palate cleansers with relaxing puzzles and secret-hunting. I think it’s a great addition to the tower defense genre which has had a problem with feeling unrelentingly stressful at times. The tech tree is very good and I like the fact that I can go back to grind for one type of resource, but not the other – it’s a good balance between making irreversible choices but also not getting savelocked because you made them overly wrong.
I didn’t love the game though. I had trouble getting accustomed to the controls which struck me as overly complex and fiddly. I felt it ramped up enemy type complexity a bit too quickly since it immediately introduces jumping/flying/wrong-color enemies which tend to foil your plans and create chaos – that’s fine as far as it goes but I’d have liked a bit more of a sense of control and well-laid plans coming to fruition, rather than constant scrambling. The platforming movement feels floaty and with wonky collision boxes, I disliked it from the first jump and it never grew on me. The artwork and script feels like a totally mediocre high-fantasy-Ghibli-film ripoff in practice, it never comes into its own as a fresh thing (which other games with the same influences, like Hyper Light Drifter, do succeed in).
So overall, I might keep playing Aegis Defenders past this first-red-zone hump or I might quit. It’s on the borderline for me
you should still be able to plug in a refular ol’ AV cable and tap audio from that while having the HDMI plugged in at the same time. baring that not working, you should be able to find little dongles that will let you plug in to the optical out and convert it to analog audio.
if that’s not enough, well
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I am sick and tired of Android autocorrect. I need it because I make too many typos, but nowadays Google Keyboard and SwiftKey are so aggressive at miscorrecting its to it’s or clobbering neologisms or jargon with common words. Does anyone have a recommendation?
Buying a new TV for the first time in a while. Do we have a dedicated thread for this?
If not then is there any reason not to get a 4K one if they cost they same and even if I don’t currently own any device that will be outputting much at that resolution?
Does plugging in a PAL SNES with composite cables (which even that doesn’t even seem to be a given any more, most are just purely HDMI holes) even work at all any more on these things whatever mangles mess of pixels actually comes through be damned?
Yeah you can use composite/component cables with most of them. The one I have even has an RF connector. I haven’t actually plugged in any legacy/pre-hd consoles into it but usually these screens display every pixel whether the game was designed to be seen that way or not (usually at the correct aspect ratio, thankfully).
The HDR is a really nice feature if you’re gaming on either of the 4K capable consoles. Other than gaming I don’t really view much 4K content at the moment. I upgraded my Netflix account recently to be able to run their 4K stuff but they don’t actually have a lot at the moment. The youtube app on the tv itself is kind of crummy in a mobile-app sort of way but I use it occasionally to watch 4K videos that way. It is a really sharp, clear image that looks really good even up close but I’m still not sure if 4K will ever see super widespread adoption the way 1080p has. But maybe it really is all just a matter of time, who knows.
720p/1080p content upscales really well on 4K displays though so I would say if you can find one that’s a comparable price to the non-4K set you’re looking at then go for it. At worst you end up with a feature you probably won’t see much use out of for a while until higher-than-1080p resolutions become a more common thing across the board.
Alternately, if you can find someone offering to sell you one, get you a Sanyo or a Sony Triniton CRT set. I have a Sanyo flat screen 20-ish inch set in my garage that I have a PS2 hooked up to and at this point even though I don’t use it much I can’t see myself ever getting rid of it because it still works like a champ and the non-hd games and dvds still looks great on it in ways they’ll never be able to on higher resolution sets.
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In all seriousness, I used Go keyboard for a while, though I can’t remember why. Anyway it seems to have a less aggressive auto correct
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I was going to suggest @Broco get a Blackberry lol but I wasn’t sure if that’s considered an insult now or what.
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I was a die-hard physical keyboardist for a while but conceded defeat on this point around 2010
To be honest it was fine until last year. Then keyboards had to go and juice their metrics by starting to correct correctly spelled words. My head just about exploded when I was writing a post about “single-payer” mid-last-year and it got corrected to “single-track”. Wtfffff
the first generation of BB10 devices were actually decent and had a well considered approach to android compatibility but those only had real software support for like one generation from 2013-2015 and the android blackberries are wildly overpriced on the basis of extremely questionable security features as well as consistently under-spec’d
I once met a guy who used to work at blackberry. He was really bitter, saying there was a faction inside the company advocating abandoning their proprietary OS and archaic designs 5 years before they finally did it too late
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yeah the real problem was that BB10 was itself a year or two late to market and they’d lost too much market share by then
Thanks, it’s on sale now on Switch, along with a bunch of other games like Necrodancer and Owlboy. I think I might pass on it for now though, since I think I was more interested in the platforming and aesthetics than the tower defence portion
is gundam breaker 3 any good?
I hear it’s a great virtual model builder made out of real model parts from the catalog of real kets. The game it self looked like a servicable as some kind of budget Armored Core meets hunter game. Haven’t touched it myself but a new one is coming out that will actually be on western markets and PC so that’s where I will probably jump in.
what are games with customizable/nameable teams like xcom/worms/oregon trail (and its offspring)
i could make a jersey shore family in the sims 4 but if they’re not out fighting monsters i dont see the point