Recorded the latest episode of TAG (Talking About Games) last Friday. Episode #10 covered the recent departure of Horizon Call of the Mountain’s Game Director, and I covered the lineage of Firesprite and their relationship with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Additional topics included a Star Wars competitive multiplayer title that has been flying under the radar but is supposedly due to release this summer. The show rounded out with a discussion about XBox’ upcoming summer showcase, and the beginnings of a multi-part thread where I cover the report card of all of the games Ubisoft put on the stage last year at their summer show as part of the prep for this year’s event. My hopes and plans are to now make TAG a more regular thing, targeting a show every four days. So the next episode will be this coming Tuesday morning, 07 May.

I’ve posted on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III Season 3 Let’s Play and have one other recorded that I need to post. My slate has a total of nine sessions that I want to do over the next 3 weeks. Two down, seven to go. These sessions are being recorded on the 377 stack, my build running an Alder lake Core i7-12700KF, an MSI RTX 4070 Super, and 64GB of RAM. And using the Elgato Wave 3 mic, Elgato Wave Arm, Elgato Pop Filter & Shock Mount, and Stream Deck XL.

And that’s also pretty much all I’ve been playing. Most nights this past week I’ve gotten started so late gaming that the only thing I had the energy for was CoD. As I turned the corner into the weekend, though, I did get some time to get back to Final Fantasy VII Remake on the PS5. It just isn’t my kind of game, but I feel it is important enough of a title for my to grit my teeth and bear it to trudge through more of it. The combat is interesting enough for me; let’s call it a 78%. Occasionally I find it hits, usually when I am fighting the regular troops and I feel like I have a chance to pull off some neat maneuvers that reward you with applicable eye-candy. Boss battles are largely an exercise in frustration that I feel like I survive but don’t necessarily enjoy. But I guess this is what I have to get through to also play Rebirth.

I also hit a trigger to make sure I am playing my physical games, and pulled out F1 22 for the PS5. I setup the Thrustmaster T300RS Gran Turismo Edition, and let me tell you. Sublime. The mark of a game or, in this case, a series, that has woven itself into my DNA, is one that you can take a long layoff from, and after coming back, with some minimal amount of dialing in settings and tweaking the cfg, fits like a glove. Apparently, I bought this installment in the series, started my season, and then put the disc in a box. SO I picked up with Round 1, practice session 2 at Bahrain International Circuit. Ran into the wall the first time out of the paddock. Spun the car out the 2nd time after restarting the session. Ran with the Maximum Top Speed setup, in PS2, then the Balanced in PS3, and kept the Balanced for Qualifying. Got on Pole. Then went on to place 2nd, after getting into Leclerc and damaging my front left endplate in lap 3. Too early to pit, I stayed on track until my designating pitting +1 lap (I had race length set for 14 laps). I was longer in the pits than planned after punching my turn-in too early. Got back on in 15th, but then moved up to tenth when the other half of the field pitted the next lap. From there I fought back to 4th, where I had to out-fight Lewis Hamilton to get to 3rd and then pulled a heroic outbreaking of Sainz to come in behind Verstappen. It was a great first outing with the new team.

I changed up livery colors after investing in the marketing department before I proceeded on to Round 2 at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Can’t wait for the next session.

Planned out the next few weeks of Let’s Play videos to shoot. The plan is super-simple, but gives me a production outlook for the next three weeks. Designated studio hardware for that setup. I’ll be over on Battlestation 2; the box that I built in early 2022, powered by an Intel Alder Lake Core i7. The GPU has recently been upgraded to an MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Super. Still working through deploying the studio gear, but I’ve figured out how to rig the Sony Alpha a6000 Mirrorless ICL camera to the Elgato Prompter, and deployed and connected the camera to the Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro.

I put in the extra hour sesh of CoD I couldn’t stay up last night to finish. Played the Small Maps Mosh Pit and finished max-levelling the Fennec SMG. Had some great matches, including one where I was tops in TDM. Got a lot of work done on the 9mm handgun, too. After that, it was over to the XBox to play some Assetto Corsa Competizione. I’ve got a lot of work to put in on that one to “git gud”. But today was a good day and lots of improvements were made. That McLaren is squirrelly AF. With that done, I folded away the Thrustmaster TMX and Diwingus fixed stand and stowed them for another day. With that arc complete, I plan to pull Warframe (PC) and Resident Evil 5 Remake (PS5) into the running rotation.

Got two episodes of Doom Patrol, Season 4 in too. Not a bad day of nerdery.

Gamer anxiety and guilt kicked in once again. And so once again, I changed up the algorithm that drives what I play each day and night. I won’t get into its complexity. The aforementioned personality defects combined with OCD lead to a quite overly-complicated ruleset. Let’s skate by that and discuss what went down. I continued my journey through Granblue Fantasy: Relink. And while there is a lot I like about this JRPG (this coming from someone for which just a short time ago, that genre was one of my “nopes”), it suffers from a similar affliction as the Ace Combat series. Battles that last too long; overstay their welcome. Parts one and two of the fight I engaged in tonight combined for a total of 50 minutes; 20 for the first part, 30 for the boss battle. In between, there’s nowhere to make a manual save. And both this game and Unicorn Overlord also have long interstitial periods between campaign chapters. I normally want to get through that and pre-stage everything before my last save so I am done with any reading and it’s just off to the next chapter when I come back for the next gaming session. Makes it a bit of a chore to wrap things up.

I also got about an hour-and-a-half of CoD: MWIII in, also on PC. Had some decent matches, I’d call it an above average night. I’ve almost max-leveled the 5.56 assault rifle that is like the FAMAS. I’ll look the name up later. LoL.

I should loop back to say that GranBlue Fantasy: Relink looks gorgeous on a 27″ IPS display. Planning on getting back into CyberPunk 2077 tomorrow. I need to burn-down some of the new games I bought last year.

Gotta put some gray matter on planning my next GPU upgrade. I need to get rid of this last Zotac card so I do not have that brand in any boxes. It’s a 3070Ti, but that box only has a 750W power supply, so I need to plan around what it can support. Good news is that during the last tweak, which was a cooling system refit and forklifting that build into a new case, I did get some custome power cables for it and ran two discrete lines for the 8-pin PCIe connectors. So, with a harness, I’ll be fine if the new GPU requires a +12VHPWR connector

I bought Unicorn Overlord on PS5 this week and started playing it. I like it. Don’t love it. Yet. Like, I don’t not love it due to any negative. It just doesn’t have me all warm down in me nibblets just yet. It might get there. Figuring out it was an Auto-Battler was a bit of a system-shock. But again, it just means it’s something that does not get me AS excited right from jump as a traditional RTS or a Strategy RTS (like Rome: Total War), or a traditional 4X game like Age of Wonders (I need to get back to those, BTW).

I captured some content (I have not broken out my Hauppage HD PVR Pro 60 for stand-alone recording on my consoles in ages. I still need to get it over to Creative Cloud to process it and get a clip posted. Hoping to do that today. Hoping to also work on a Twitter Op-Ed today; which I am moving to making news, history, finance, and software/tech oriented and less about whatever the Twitter community nonsense is that week. I’ve decided it just does not make sense nor is it good use of my time to engage in or entertain arguments from people about finance or software development, or to campaign for more level-headed news coverage and discussion. The contamination has spread too far. The  great conceipt of The Walking Dead is that they were all infected.

Speaking of which, that has been my binge this week. Watching it on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 128GB (needs to be upgraded) and my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra 256GB (I’ve uninstalled my work apps on this device and am just using it as a personal phone, I mean, since I pay for it, although I still use it for my two work numbers for voice calls and texts), along with the Cowin E7 Bluetooth headphones. My only bother is that somewhere I’ve apparently already downloaded Season 1 to 5 devices and so could not download it locally to my S23 Ultra, although I also cannot administrate that from the Google TV app itself. Bit of a pain-in-the-ass.

I’ve continued to grind on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III Season 3. I hit up a small map session last night as I worked SMG unlocks; Sniper rifles earlier in the week. So glad the technical problems I was having at the launch of S3 have settled out. The main monitor on my RTX4080 rig (an LG 27″) has been blinking out, but only when I am in dual-monitor mode (I kill the 2nd monitor when gaming) and never while actually playing a game. Watching it with the side-eye for now. I would have normally knee-jerked and done something about it, but I just bought that display in January. Gonna let that marinate for a bit.

Minor spoilers for anyone who has not played Spider-Man 2 (but I think most have): Went back to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 last night, also. What an amazing game. Ran it in performance mode (1440p), and played through the Negative Man fight; that part where Miles has been captured by Kraven. What a pain that fight was. Kept me up until 230AM. Not a fan. Mind-boggld my all the graphical options Insomniac has put in that game’s menu to allow the user to tailor the graphical experience for themselves, while the industry continues to make AAA flagship exclusives that only permit one or two options, one of which is often 4K30,

Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago on a podcast if we (the general consumer market) still buy MP3 players. I have a drawer full (not saying that the answer to his question was yes). I’d stopped using them while on remote assignment b/c I was always in a rush to make the 7 hour commute and it became just easier to rotate a pair of BT headphones and use my phones. Now that I’m back, I’ve been wanting to get back to using them. I merged my old music archive with my new. I still need to load it onto all mobile devices and my MP3 payers. For now, I’ve just broken out the Apple iPod Classic 160GB and the Astell & Kearn Super Junior x AK Jr. I do love using dedicated MP3 players and once I kind of resurge them back into my workflow, I’ll be looking to the ones that need to be upgraded. I lost an iPhone and an iPod Touch on that assignment, so there are some slots, but a couple of them are also probably ready to be retired.

Drafted on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7

Returning from Spring Break today, and, truth be told, despite bringing copious mobile gaming gear, I hardly gamed at all. I’ve got some trudge-work to do re-onboarding into mobile gaming on Android; I’ve probably sunk my teeth back into iOS more. The most I did was hook up my Xbox Controller and phone holder and played #Drive and Asphalt 8 on the OnePlus 12 last night.

I caught that I’d left the OnePlus in 120Hz mode all day from when I was playing Air Traffic Controller the night before. Despite “over-running” it at a completely unnecessary refresh rate for a full day, I still finished the day at over 40% battery power. This phone is the phone for people who suffer from smartphone battery anxiety.

All-in-all, it was a good trip for tech. I’ve given up in recent years my meticulous planning and writing about my pack-up kit. My recent disillusionment with the gaming conversation has had much to-do with my renewed focus on laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, phones, audio, etc, and I’ll be spending more of my time focused on those aspects of consumer electronics.

Funny thing is…my first assignment for when I get back? Trying out some Android games on the Chromebook Flex 5. It all goes full circle

Drafted in ColorNote on my OnePlus 12

It took much longer for setup than I had planned, but I finally pulled off a Let’s Play last night. Got started an hour-and-a-half later than I’d anticipated 😭. The mic-arm setup in particular turned out to be problematic; not enough reach for where I’d mounted it behind the monitor. I’ll need to move it today before recording another session. Regardless, I put some time in on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III for the capture session; had some good to great matches on the front end and then gradually got a bit worse. Surprised some of the Sniper Kiddies on Wasteland by using a Battle Rifle again. I love it when they expect to encounter some slow rate-of-fire opponent and then get clipped by 3 or four quick rounds when they expected me to be reloading. 🤣

I spent some time making new planning cards since I switched from the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 to the iPad Pro 11″ Gen 3 256GB and needed to write them up in a new app. Generated them in Notepad+ Pro. Made a Weekly Priority template in Tasks Plus, which I expected would be limited without a subscription. But I was surprised to find that it does allow you to make multiple Task Projects with just the free version.

I had scripted that I was going to play some more War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius this morning, but decided I would just leave that for the Tab S7. I downloaded Civilization VI for the iPad instead. I swore that I had that game already, but maybe it is a past version of Civ. Will check that when I get done with this log entry.

Pulled together notes on the current gaming industry news cycle while drinking coffee and working at BattleStation 5 (the AMD Ryzen 5-5600X and RTX 3070 Ti box). Metacritic’s 14th Annual Game Publisher Rankings are up and I posted some quick decomps on that topic

Also reported around the web today:

Players Having Major Issues with MLB the Show 24 on Switch

Overwatch 2 devs lose bonus pay after Blizzard policy change

And check my Twitter account to catch up on some highlights from the GDC State of The Industry Report 2024. I posted 8 highlights this AM, two examples are below. It’s going to take me a few days to go through the report, as I want to chew my food; just read and think about a few pages a day at a time, otherwise the significance of the data will get lost unless I give myself time to decompose it and consider the ramifications. A lot to absorb in the report, which is 37 pages

Despite my best efforts, it doesn’t look like I’m going to get extra gaming in today. I took off a 1/2 day from work for some medical appointments. I was 15 minutes into my session of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (PC) when I got interrupted and had to take a call out. I did get back and got the remainder of the 1.5 hours in that I’d wanted to clock. I did max level the .50 GS tonight. And finally had a good round on Wasteland by arming a Battle Rifle to fend off all the sniper kiddies on that map. I hate that map. Also had two matches on Stash House and the camping on Small Maps is just outta control. I’m just gonna say that if you camp on small maps you are just an asshole.

At any rate, it was my hope to get in another session of No Man’s Sky (PC) tonight. But I need to get in a workout on the spin cycle tomorrow morning and go into the office. At best, I’ll get the last episode of Enough 2 Keep Going posted and maybe get in 30 minutes of War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7. We’ll see.

All of this talk of mobile devices taking over the PC and console gaming space has made me add dedicated time back into my gaming rotation to play mobile games. I want first-hand experience of how far gaming has come in 13 years since I really stopped playing on mobile as a general going concern back in 2019. I’ve definitely still played. I’ve used the foldables in conjunction with an XBox or PlayStation controller to play Horizon Zero Chase Turbo on my foldables. I’ve actually put both the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and 5 and the Google Pixel Fold through a significant number of paces as part of my evaluation of the new smartphone flagship. But I have not been given over to play on a tablet every day like I used to do starting ten years ago.

The Steam Deck is in the mix his week too, and I spent time the other day refreshing the OS and updates on the Steam Deck LCD and installing Deep Rock Galactic, which is my next target for handheld gaming. On my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7, I’ve been getting started in War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius.

Last night was more time spent on Call of Duty: Mobile Warfare III on the main desktop (Ryzen 7 – 7800X3D + RTX 4080). It’s really nice playing first person shooters over there again now that I’ve gone back to the 27″ IPS 1440p 144MHz displays.

Had a good time on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III tonight. I was disappointed in some of the queueing. I sat in the lobby for Hardcore and Meat 24/7 and the rooms never filled up. What that might mean for Hardcore, I won’t speculate just yet. For Meat 24/7, it could mean one of two things:

1. the badge for that LTE was far to the right, and people may just not be scrolling that far, esp once they see Small Map Mosh Pit first

2. it could mean that it is significantly out of favor amongst the small maps, and people don’t want to play it in comparison to Rust, Shipment, and Stash House

I’m still lamenting my likely decision to never go back to Halo Infinite due to its dwindling player-base. It is a bit worrying to think that the same might be occurring around the edges of CoD. I’m only good at a very small number of PvP games. 😅😂😭

One thing for Sledgehammer to think about is that they just have way too many LTEs + LTMs going on right now and if the player base is not going to show any interest in them, then it may not make sense to expend that labor effort. I will invite into entry as an argument that this might be just that…experimentation so that they can look at the telemetry and see what people aren’t playing so they can swerve away from that in the future.

I’m back on Microsoft Flight Simulator tomorrow, although my sked is tight, so we’ll see. The Logitech Yoke Flight System is staged and I worked through what I hope are a lot of the kinks. Hopefully tomorrow will just be flying.

I watched another episode of Doom Patrol tonight on the Chromecast, and so have maybe 3 episodes left in Season 3. I did not pull a script together for TAG over the weekend. Or tonight. I still plan on doing one this week, but probably need to scrap what I had as a draft and start over with the news cycle. Then figure out where I will squeeze it in.

Drafted on the Google Pixel Fold with the Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000