Hey everyone. It's me again, Scrooloose, with another WRUP. I hope you're all having a good weekend and still managing your best during this continued isolation period. It does appear that some places are looking to slowly open back up, however. I guess we can only hope that they do this the most intelligent ways possible and we don't see a resurgence in infection numbers over the coming weeks. Even a few local-ish businesses around my neck of the woods are looking to start testing the waters. The brew pub I most frequent is planning to open next Wednesday and start a four hour semi-normal work day on top of already taking phone-in orders. On the one hand I'm excited to possibly get some good fresh beer again, on the other I'm not sure I'm convinced it's the time to start opening things up yet. Case numbers across the US number nearly a million now and that number is still going up. We have to be smart or I think we're just going to end up drastically prolonging the current situation.

Anyway guys, stay safe and stay patient. Let's talk about some game news.

Google has been in a long standing law suit against EPIC Games in a bid to allow the very popular battle royale shooter, Fortnite, to be sold on it's Google Play Store. The rub is about how EPIC doesn't like the fact that Google will get 30% of all sales of Fortnite as per the rules for selling on the Play Store. Yet, EPIC has now cancelled it's opposition and is allowing Google to sell Fortnite after all. I'll drop in a quote from EPIC here as to the reason why...

"Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store."

So it seems that EPIC has just been trying to push that boulder up a pretty steep hill. Though according to Ars Technica (you can read the whole story there) they did manage to sell a staggering 15 million Android copies in just 21 days.

Players of Minecraft can now turn on some real time ray tracing assuming they have a pretty good RTX GPU from Nvidia. I have to say that even though I don't care about ray tracing in the least, nor do I play Minecraft -it actually looks alright. Though not every texture is ray traced (not every texture is even a texture in Minecraft) you're likely to see plenty of changes in your world. DLSS also seems to have decent use case with some scaling helping to manage all those "chunks" being rendered at once. Head on over to the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel to see it in action and get the rundown.

According to Game Rant and quite a few other outlets for that matter, Mick Gordon, the music composer for those fantastic and crunchy Doom and Doom Eternal tracks you'll hear while crushing demons under foot and double barrel shotgun, is unlikely to return for more of the same. The doubt seems to stem from some less than stellar mixing of the newly released OST. Complaints about the overall sound and compression of the audio have arisen. Gordon has stated that he didn't have anything to do with the mixing of the sound track and now he's saying he'll fix it himself. Kit Guru has more on that last bit.

In what comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's even heard of the title, Star Citizen, is being delayed yet again. It seems some pretty anticipated fixes have been put off until version 4.1 releases. I'll just link the story from PC gamer rather than sift some info out. It's a rather short read anyway.

Personally, I do hope that Star Citizen actually has a successful release if it ever gets out the decade long development hell in which it's been wallowing. There have been some pretty cool new inventions of rendering tech to handle the immense scale of the game and it would be cool to see it in action first hand.

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Okay that's enough of that. What's the plan this weekend?

AJ: Zelda month concludes with some Link’s Awakening and/or Twilight Princess (along with some Smash Bros Ultimate for good measure).

Greywolfe: well, i'm grinding away at secret of mana.  it's the grind that never ends, evidently.  i had to do an EXPRESSLY stupid thing [that i'll link to in a moment] to level up my weapons and i suspect i will have to do that again.  ac:  origins goes.  going to tackle the last three papyrus puzzles i have left, and then it's just story all the way and then i'll be done.  on stream, i've been playing a little "my time at portia," which is about what i expected:  lots of hoops to jump through to do stuff.  [lots of machines to build, etc.] - i can see this being relaxing, but i'm not sure it's a good streaming experience except as an every once-in-a-while game.
so.  that link:  read at your own peril, because it's excessively stupid:  https://twitter.com/lostwolfe/status/1253332941477867529

Yoda: New PC equals a weekend of getting all my Audio Software and VST files set back up correctlyAlso this is the last weekend of the Scarlet Spear event in Warframe, so definitely gnna fly some spaceships to destroy evil Robot Capital Ships lol

Scroo: More WWZ with some friendos, some more MudRunner to prep myself for SnowRunner on Tuesday, and I've been messing around with Just Cause 4. People hated on that game a lot but I feel like there's not actually that much to complain about. It runs just fine and looks beautiful. There is some downgrading to water, which is strange, but not game breaking. The biggest complaint I'd have is the UI is a little hard to navigate. Having a good time with it