Oh boy it's another WRUP written a day late. I was so busy yesterday prepping for this atmospheric river storm that's currently rolling in that I just didn't have time to sit down and write even a quick weekend greeting. But on this early morning Sunday before 7:00am I've got my coffee and a couple of topics to talk about.
This storm is supposed to be pretty big. And I believe it since last time we had a major atmospheric river roll through we got something like nine inches of rain in five hours. I don't think is supposed to be quite that much at once but over the next two days we're expecting (according to the forecast) some four to six inches. My winter time prep work has been lacking this year which is largely my fault, but also I had a major element out of my control and that was having to take my chainsaws to a professional for service. I maintain my tools but these seemed beyond my knowledge and it was time to have them gone through. I have two Stihl saws, an ms170 for limbing and over-head work and an old ms310 for the big stuff. Neither were running, like at all. I've had that 310 since I was like 17 or 18 years old. It lasted many years, did many literal tons of work and got me out of some sticky situations, but it's now in that big wood pile in the sky. Sadly repairs for the old workhorse were going to cost nearly as much as a new saw, so I bit the bullet and spent $650 on a brand new ms391. The next day (yesterday) I cut and split 50 rounds of pine and got it stacked and covered as to be protected from the rain. After the storm I guess I'll just have to deal with wet wood. I also went down to my creek and cut a big oak limb out that had fallen in from the huge wind event we had months ago to avoid the creek backing up and flooding across the driveway as it's done before. So all that coupled with double-checking that driveway drainage was good, free of leaves and recent gopher excavations both at my house and a friend's place while they're gone for the weekend, meant that I was a busy mofo. I don't think I did too bad though for a good solid single day of prep work.
Okay anyway let's talk about WRUP stuff.
God of War from 2018 is making that jump to PC on January 14th of next year. This is excellent news because the more ports we get the less exclusivity there is in games and that's good for everyone. More people getting more titles on more systems can only help the market. Let's hope the port is a bit better than the Horizon Zero Dawn most recently and we see better optimization. That's hard to do for PC in general just because of the sheer amount hardware combinations one can use. I'm excited for this not only because GoW was a great title, but also because it's going to be $50 instead of $60 or $70. I did play the PS4 version, however I never did finish it. I dunno, I guess I just didn't really want it to end. Here's a look from Sony's blog site
Speaking of PC hardware combinations, NZXT has a super awesome new BLD kit that lets buy a PC that gets shipped to you for your own assembly. You'll get a few choices in parts combos with Intel and AMD and once purchased your crate of goodies comes with a great looking manual containing all the instructions required to help you build your own PC. Guys, this is such a great idea and one of those that makes you wonder why it hadn't happened sooner. Once again I refer you to Jayz Two Cents for a video of how well the kit works
Keeping the unintentional theme, it seems that the RPCS3 emulator will now boot every PS3 game on your PC. Big deal, you may say, but this is a pretty big achievement. The PS3 had some weird proprietary CPU that operated differently than anything else at the time and that meant that all it's games had to be coded to work with that hardware alone. So there was more or less no chance of real PC ports without every single title being re-coded for "normal" CPU's. RPCS3 claims to have a "zero nothing status" meaning that every game will at least boot up. Some don't work very well, some only display black screens, but there are some two thousand playable titles now. Pretty rad. PC Gamer has a quick read on that
Okay what the hell is going on here
AJ: Since last week I've been on sort of a retro games kick and was able to acquire copies of Cosmic Carnage for the 32X and Sega Worldwide Soccer '97 for the Saturn (neither of which I've ever played). I also picked up Ghosts 'N Goblins Resurrection. Between the three of those, I should have plenty to keep myself occupied.