Another week. another WRUP. But soon some new content coming so stick with us.
CES looks to have been a little slow this year. Still, some neat stuff was highlighted and some statements were made including Lisa Su confirming a high end Navi card to compete NVidia coming this year. New consoles and so on also coming, supposedly supporting ray tracing and 4k, 60FPS and all that. Though I can't imagine that will be all that awesome since it seems doubtful that the GPU's going into those machines will be even as powerful as a RTX2060. Though, I may be a bit biased since I still feel like ray tracing is pretty useless in a real time situation. However, I did also see a very good argument for ray tracing that I have to say makes a ton of sense. It had to do with game developers themselves saying that ray tracing would be awesome if that was the only thing going in to the coding of games because it requires much less work to make useable. The typical way we see lighting in games comes from a bunch of settings that take tens of thousands of lines of code to make work, while ray tracing takes a fraction of that. So perhaps in a few years, once every GPU manufacturer is on board with real time ray tracing and the tech catches up to be able to handle it, the work load for coders could become considerably lighter. And as a result we could get some games that look slightly better than typical rasterized lighting and shadows and ambient occlusion. I guess. Whatever.
So what are folks playing this weekend?
Greywolfe: hello darkness, my old friend. i've come to wrup with you again. and this time, i'm playing police quest 4. which - so far - has been exactly the sort of weird awful i was imagining it would be from everything i've read. but in the other awful corner, i'm playing shovel knight: king of cards. i'm very nearly done with it, but i might have a "hand of fate" situation on my hands: most of hof was passable. then you get to the end guy. the end guy is STUPIDLY DIFFICULT for no reason other than "we wanted to create some fake difficulty in our game." well. king of cards is the same. near-endboss? he takes all your little powers that you accrue throughout the game away. you have to beat him with your default move. him? he gets fireballs and homing missiles and a bunch of dumb toys. it's ridiculous. [i wrote a thing about fake difficulty once upon a time. you can read it here: http://twinstiq.weebly.com/home/opinion-why-fake-difficulty-hurts-your-game ] ps: that's on SUPER OLD TWINSTIQ. don't comment on it. :)
Scrooloose: Same ol' same ol' for me. More MechWarrior 5, I'm enjoying making videos for it. Not sure how many more I'll do as the channel is being flooded with them now. I have at least two more coming for the "Hero Squad" single mission highlights that I'm doing. But other than that it'll be more Borderlands 3, though it's becoming a bit stale now that we're on our third characters. I really should pick up Phoenix Point again since I really like it but it's proving difficult and I feel a whole game restart may be in order to properly play.
AJ: Mostly I’ll be writing up my best of 2019 article but I may try to find time to play some Gears 5 and Team Sonic Racing.