Keyrock

D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die

Wait, the Cowboys came back and won? HOW!? I gave up on that game after their 80th fumble.

Cowboys fumbling the season away. So be it. I'm too apathetic to get mad.

Hitman GO is indeed pretty great. I need to take a break from La-Mulana 2. Not because I hit a wall, on the contrary, I'm making tremendous progress and I'm in an area I've only begun to explore, but because I'm on the verge of developing a blister on my thumb. You know it's a hardcore platformer when it blisters your thumb. I guess I'll play D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die for a bit. Take me away to crazy town, Swery.

The guardian of Immortal Battlefield: 4 guardians down. Not gonna lie, this battle kicked my ass many times until I figured out his dodge timings and the best place to get in damage. This battle requires patience, you can get some extra damage in outside of the optimal damage position, but you will likely pay a steep price. Props to Nigoro for making every guardian battle completely different. He dropped Mjölnir after I defeated him, so it was well worth it. It's on like neckbone.

Apropos the top half, it's a legitimate question. Eat them both.

I'm back with another dose of obscure video game trailers that nobody asked for, featuring a game only I am likely to play:

There's no accounting for taste.

All of my discrete video cards since the early 2000s have been Nvidia, simply because that's when I switched to Linux. For the longest time the ATI, later AMD, Linux drivers were laughably bad, while Nvidia's Linux drivers were more or less on par with their Windows counterpart. So it really didn't matter if ATI/AMD had superior hardware because it would still perform like ass on Linux. That has changed over the last few years, namely with AMD open-sourcing driver tech specs, something they did many years back, but it took some years to pay off (Valve also had a helping hand in getting AMD drivers up to snuff). These days I'm not stuck with Team Green, there are good Linux drivers for Team Red, and Team Blue, for that matter.

Presented with no context whatsoever As is proper for a Tim & Eric skit.

I bought D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die. Not sure when I'll play it, but it was so cheap on Steam they were virtually giving it away. It's a Swery game, so I can practically guarantee that there will be gameplay aspects that will make me want to break my controller and throw my monitor out of the window, but I will ultimately love the game.

Fun fact: My first video card was a Voodoo3 3000. I remember playing UT99 in STUNNING 800x600. Back then I also didn't suck at FPS... I wasn't great, but I didn't suck, like I do today. Good times. P.S. UT99 is still the best competitive FPS ever.

Here I was thinking that maybe now would be the time for me to finally take the plunge and try VR. After watching the Battle Sister trailer, I'll wait some time longer.

The guardian of Annwfn, Kujata: 3 guardians defeated ? number of guardians to go.

My general rule of thumb is to take every performance figure given by the manufacturer themselves with a 55 gallon drum of salt. That goes for Nvidia, AMD, Intel, et al. There's no point in getting a 3080 for 1080p gaming at all, unless you are a MLG 420 BLAZE IT PRO GAMER and the difference between 200 FPS and 230 FPS will mean the difference between hitting and missing that 360 no scope sniper shot in CS:GO for you.

I don't know what people were expecting if the benchmarks are a "disappointment"? This is a pretty substantial improvement over Turing. Anyway, I'm waiting until AMD shows their hand before making a decision.

I reached a new area, Gate of the Dead, in La-Mulana 2. It's an Egyptian themed area with a cool gimmick where certain special doorways flip the entire area upside down. It's a pretty great area, despite all the traps. I'd post screenies, but any still won't do it justice because there are a lot of moving parts in the background.

How about dem Nugs?

Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge are tourist trap towns with the weirdness factor turned up to 11 and breathtakingly beautiful mountains serving as the backdrop. There is no shortage of sights in both towns which will make you say "what the $@*%!?" Pigeon Forge is also the home of Dollywood, so if you like country singers with humongous mammaries, they got your hook up.

My parents came to visit and I drove them west to the mountains. We stopped in Asheville and had a super delicious brunch at a French bistro that was shockingly inexpensive for how nice an establishment it was and how good the food was. We then drove through the Smokies into Tennessee and visited Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. I love seeing the looks on people's faces that are seeing Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for the first time.

I can't even have my classic week 1 overreaction since I watched a grand total of zero minutes of football yesterday. My folks were in town, so football was the furthest thing from my mind.