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there's a frog in my snake oil
really are they gonna release it =o i know psvr 2 is releasing Horizon Call of the Mountain for psvr 2 im excited for that game
H3 is already out as a PSVR exclusive, but it only uses the standard controller (with the odd motion thrown in). Hopefully they'll release an updated version for all platforms now they've got the motion controller gameplay working too

Yeah HCM is the only PS exclusive they've teased to date. Sure there'll be more though, this was just a statement of intent.
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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here



H3 is already out as a PSVR exclusive, but it only uses the standard controller (with the odd motion thrown in). Hopefully they'll release an updated version for all platforms now they've got the motion controller gameplay working too

Yeah HCM is the only PS exclusive they've teased to date. Sure there'll be more though, this was just a statement of intent.
i didnt know that didnt see it at my local gaming store 😣. i will check it out the gameplay😀. hope so too but i didnt like the motion controller that much 😖 lol. i hope so cause im getting forbidden west when it released



there's a frog in my snake oil
Ok I know the Valheim assets look scrubby as anything, but this is a good example of how the atmospheric stuff raises their game. A mist that rolled in, looking in 2 different directions from the same spot:




(Seemed to have gameplay implications too. Like the boar I was kiting towards my base lost me way more easily than usual. Also, creatures tend to spring out of nowhere more )



I think I know what is the most insanely annoying thing in the world.. having a firefight with two people on free fire and some third person starts firing at you from somewhere and kills you. What a mother****ing ****



there's a frog in my snake oil
Viking update:

After various accidents, fence re-modellings, and at least one moonlit chase over some hills shouting 'NO', I have viking farmed some wild boar.



I am pretty sure they are the right sexes. Although it has occurred to me that I didn't actually check this while letting them chase me into the pens.

They do suggest quite strongly that Valheim is a pretty grindy game though. I need the boars to get 20 leather straps for the next workbench upgrade. Each boar drops one strap...

To get the first one to become fully tame took like 5 in-game days or something. In the meantime I built a raft, travelled to a different island, crashed the raft, built an entirely different base, and discovered the summoning portal for an ancient evil. And then somehow charted my way back on a misty night with no map...

But to be fair to the game, both the act of viking farming, and the act of homebrew sailing and adventuring, were cool and diverting

The sailing itself seems kind of decent. You've got wind direction, a basic tiller which tilts your sail (seemingly), 3 sail speeds, and much room for misadventure. And for weather and waves to mess with your day. (There are some handy arcade sides to it though. You can slowly reverse if you mess up your landing for example, regardless of what the wind's doing )

EDIT: I should probably mention a few anti-grindy aspects that are welcome. You can repair your gear for free at a workbench when you get back from a jaunt. And food isn’t a daily chore, you just use it for buffs when needed (health / stamina).

Also weirdly, due to VR, I’m looking forward to just chilling in this world and doing some fishing



there's a frog in my snake oil
Viking update:

Totally underestimated the first boss... I had my best 'Level 2' gear, but was powered only by a simple lizard tail for breakfast. (If you combine 3 different food types you get a combined bonus to stamina and health)

As the trees around me were torn asunder, my chosen weapon just chipped away at their health, and various deranged magical attacks rained down, it became clear I didn't have enough stamina to keep dodging while also drawing my bow...

So I died. And due to the map glitch in VR, I never did find my body again. (But did run into the forest of death naked a few times gamely trying to find it )

So I've reset. Back to the grind. Girding my loins properly this time. Which was a bit deflating.

But on the plus side, I can navigate my rubbish raft around fairly dextrously now, and getting lost exploring the limits of my randomised starter meadows and forests was genuinely distracting. (Almost doubly so in an enforced 'no HUD' style mode without the map, just using landmarks and sun position to learn the lie of the land. Made the changing light on the leaves as dusk settled in all the more important, because getting turned around and lost in those forests is easily done...)

I was just a deranged viking with 80 arrows, a shopping list of boar and deer, and a skill pool on the rise simply by foraging away. (And by occasionally sniping the strange mini-troll things that blabber about the undergrowth...)

Still liking all told



The Adventure Starts Here!
I figure you Videogames nerds might be able to help me here. I recently bought a 43" 4K smart TV to use as a computer monitor. It's been AWESOME to have that much screen real estate, but I notice that the screen flickers/goes off for a few seconds when I try to stream anything like video (in games, on YouTube, videos on Facebook--whatever).

A little Googling suggested lowering the refresh rate. The options available to me were the 60 it was set at, the marginally lower 59.something (which is where it is now), and then something far, far lower (like, 30-ish?). The 59.something setting has not solved the problem, but I hesitate to lower it as far as 30. Can I randomly type in a number there in my settings (Windows 10)? If so, what would be a good choice? Or is 30 okay? Note: I am NOT big into tweaking these things as much as some of you, so if I lose a little quality (a little) but gain a screen that doesn't flicker or go blank on me, then it might be worth it to me.

Showing my ignorance of these things, sorry...



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
I figure you Videogames nerds might be able to help me here. I recently bought a 43" 4K smart TV to use as a computer monitor. It's been AWESOME to have that much screen real estate, but I notice that the screen flickers/goes off for a few seconds when I try to stream anything like video (in games, on YouTube, videos on Facebook--whatever).

A little Googling suggested lowering the refresh rate. The options available to me were the 60 it was set at, the marginally lower 59.something (which is where it is now), and then something far, far lower (like, 30-ish?). The 59.something setting has not solved the problem, but I hesitate to lower it as far as 30. Can I randomly type in a number there in my settings (Windows 10)? If so, what would be a good choice? Or is 30 okay? Note: I am NOT big into tweaking these things as much as some of you, so if I lose a little quality (a little) but gain a screen that doesn't flicker or go blank on me, then it might be worth it to me.

Showing my ignorance of these things, sorry...

Just guessing, but can your graphics card handle 4k resolution? See if lowering resolution stops the issue, just for testing. If so, then you might need a stepup with a new card. You might also check for a game mode setting on the new tv and turn it on.


I didn't have seconds worth of lag or blackout, but I could not run game settings high at all when I built my PC a few years back. I had a great processor that was cable of handling video but even that was spotty at 4k. For context, that was an i9-9900k, so I thought it should have been able to handle things fine. I ended up getting a relatively cheap MSI card off the shelves of Best Buy and everything was fine after that. This was late 2019 or early 2020. Still holds up fine. I'd have to boot up to check the exact model.


Now that I think about it, I got the graphics card to troubleshoot audio issues. I was concerned the video rendering was taxing the processor to the point it created noise in my audio recordings. Still, game settings had to be like medium or less at 4k until I got the dedicated card. Didn't fix my audio but games are fine!



The Adventure Starts Here!
I checked the card specs before I bought the TV and all seemed well, yes. I'm using the recommended resolution settings, which are NOT the highest it's capable of. I opted for the recommended slightly lower resolution.

When I use it as a SmartTV, all is fine. It's when I change to its HDMI port to use the computer, that's when the flashing/flickering occurs. And it's not just games. It's anything *moving*: YouTube videos (of any resolution), GIFs, videos from people's phones, etc. Anything that moves can trigger it.



The Adventure Starts Here!
Well, I changed one small thing in the Display settings. I don't know what "HDR" is, but I turned it off. I then restarted the computer, after also installing the latest driver for my NVidia card (I keep up with these so I don't think the driver was the issue--they come out with new drivers every ten minutes, it seems). I didn't do/change anything else.

So far (a half hour) it hasn't flickered and I have a YouTube livestream running to test it out. Do any of you know what "HDR" is (I assume HD = High Definition but don't know what the R is. Resolution?






The Adventure Starts Here!
This is still working. I suspect that the "Display capabilities" stating "Stream HDR video = No" is/was my answer. This isn't capable of streaming HDR video so I needed to turn that off. Any other suggestions? I'll test out my theory/change with a game or two later this evening.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
HDR is High Dynamic Range. Like, in photography, you expose for the whites and risk the shadows losing detail. If you expose for the darks to increase darker details, you blow out the whites. HDR is a higher range of color values more or less giving you all the highlight details while keeping details in the darker areas too. It's more data passing through, showing both high and lows where usually one or the other is prioritized. Sorta. I believe it also depends on the source. Not all games offer HDR and not all films are recording HDR.

Good deal on testing to get it to work!

Do you have another HDMI port to test? Could be the tv.

Are you using an external HDMI hub to run multiple devices through, to the one tv HDMI port? Perhaps that could be an issue. Some are passthrough 4k others could be limiting.

Sometimes cables crap out too.

As to refresh, I doubt you would notice unless you're playing run and gun FPS type games where things are moving crazy fast. You might see some input lag if so. Test it at 30 and watch something and see. At that size a screen it might be more obvious as you're sitting closer, but that may really depend on your use.

Sorry I'm not helping. Just tossing thoughts.



The Adventure Starts Here!
Your thoughts are all greatly appreciated. As is your explanation of a term I'd never heard of.

This TV has four HDMI ports. As a Smart TV, it doesn't need to be plugged into anything else to function as a TV. So the only thing I have plugged into it is a high-quality HDMI cable going straight from the TV to the computer itself. If this starts happening again, I'll test another port. Good thinking on that, but so far no issues with streaming YouTube vids. Next I'll try something like Netflix (which is the kind of streaming where it first showed up weeks ago). To watch anything on Netflix or Amazon Prime, for instance, I was just switching it back to being a TV to watch anything that streamed. Watching through a computer app caused the flickering/momentary lapses.

With text like I'm typing here, I can see a difference in sharpness (or something) with the HDR turned off. Inconsequential, but since I'm looking for differences, I notice it. Definitely worth it if it stops the flickering, though. Fingers crossed.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
I THINK there are text settings in Windows to compensate crispness at higher video resolutions. May just be a checkbox, but I just don't remember. Your youngin' might know more on that.



Played The Forgotten City. Eight hours, one day, all endings. If I'd been content with one ending I'd have spent more like four, and the "good" ending, maybe five and a half?

I was positive I would love this game based on the description and general praise I heard early on, but I was already sitting on maybe a dozen games I was very excited to play but just haven't been able to dedicate the proper attention to. Today was the start of a long weekend, in the new house, without a lot of work or house-related things waiting on me, so it was an ideal time to sit down and start getting through that highly anticipated backlog.





I will say very very little about The Forgotten City, but if you look up the premise/read a tiny bit about it, and it SOUNDS like something you'll like...it is. It is quite good.

(No, it is not a Myst clone, even though the first image above might suggest it.)



The Adventure Starts Here!
Played The Forgotten City. Eight hours, one day, all endings. If I'd been content with one ending I'd have spent more like four, and the "good" ending, maybe five and a half?

I was positive I would love this game based on the description and general praise I heard early on, but I was already sitting on maybe a dozen games I was very excited to play but just haven't been able to dedicate the proper attention to. Today was the start of a long weekend, in the new house, without a lot of work or house-related things waiting on me, so it was an ideal time to sit down and start getting through that highly anticipated backlog.





I will say very very little about The Forgotten City, but if you look up the premise/read a tiny bit about it, and it SOUNDS like something you'll like...it is. It is quite good.

(No, it is not a Myst clone, even though the first image above might suggest it.)
If it's not overly violent, I might be interested. Gonna go read up on it a little bit. Looks gorgeous!



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
Othercide





I started a strange little game titled, Othercide. I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet as the intro tutorial was awkward and long, but I love the art design. The trailer is a bit misleading as most of the above are cutscenes clips, but that's ok as this seems to be a modern take on the old turn-based style that I used to love. That was a pleasant surprise.


This next video has a few actual gameplay screens. They stand out by their simplified animations and red grid of the level boards.






The first character you control is named Mother. She seems to be some form of guardian between Reality and Unreality. It looks as though there is some kind of creature that aims to seed some life that, I guess, will destroy both realities. I'm really not positive on any of it as the narrative is minimal and is offered as poetry or verses taken from a fictional spiritual book of sorts.


In the end of the tutorial, I did learn that Mother may be too weak to fight this evil, so she gives birth to three daughters. The act is all alien mystical and clean, btw. Some humanoid form just appears from a cavernous pool and you get to name her. You choose a a class skill set of three options equivalent to your typical close combat sword fighter, ranged gunman, or a shielded protector.


You can send all three daughters to a level to create synergy between the class skills. Each character has X amount of moves per turn, but within that limit you can move along tiles planning a strategy against foes on the board and/or use your skills. Some skills are offensive while others are defensive. Some cast preemptive affects on foes, yourself, or your sisters.


Each stage seems to have a set number of demons to kill, then you're back into the Void to rest. Once past all the freshman level poetry, the game got interesting. I created one slasher and two gunslingers and did well enough my first go at it. Each daughter only had two skills by default, but I was able to upgrade after the level was complete. It also looked as though I could create additional daughters but decided to save out and crash. There is a timeline tool that's supposed to be quite important, but I haven't figured that out yet.


Aside from obvious teaming strategies, a big point to the game is the ability to sacrifice one daughter for the lives of others, giving her life HP to her sisters to finish a level. That seems to be a major story element and narrative progression tool. I'm just too early in to see how it plays.


So far I've run the tutorial lesson (kinda useless) and the first level. I'm digging it but I'm not sure how long that will last. It is fun, but different with a weird Soul Reaver vibe. It's a gorgeous style though, even if the designers leaned a bit to much into that disproportional anime hot chick look.