OMGWTFBBQ it's another weekend. Things are warming up around here and spring has just unloaded on the allergy sensitive, myself included to some extent. Usually I don't get the stuffies and the sniffles this time of the year too terribly, but holy cow this has been quite a pollen filled opener to the season. Hopefully it's not too bad on the day go in for my second vaccine dose. I don't want to be turned away because they mistake it for something worse. Anyway, as the kids say -let's rap.
One of my very favorite OG NES RPG games is available for Switch now. Crystalis, is a large world RPG in the vein of Zelda. Lots of cool exploring to do, a sword that shoots magic when you swing it, lots of monsters, caves, swamps and NPC's and a sound track that will stick in your brain, in a good way. I played through this several times way back in the day and I highly recommend it now as it holds up quite well. You'll just need the NES app for your Switch but there's more info from Inverse here.
Metro Exodus for the PC has a new "enhanced" edition coming around that is a fully ray traced only iteration and it looks pretty dang fancy. I'm not a huge proponent for ray tracing yet, it still needs a lot of work I think, but I'm glad it's progressing to a point that we may start seeing it as a major facet of some titles. Previously the only real fully ray traced title was Control and that's fine but it's also only one case. Other titles exist of course but they're limited to shadows or reflections or what have you. The tech is catching up and that's great because it's good to see progress in general. I'll link to a video from Digital Foundry if you're interesting in seeing it yourself.
Nvidia is releasing yet more SKUs for the 30xx series GPU stack. The 3080ti is seemingly more than a rumor now but it's also still very likely to be an unobtainable dream for most of us still wishing to purchase a new a graphics card. Similarly the rumors of XTX versions of AMD's lineup are floating about. It seems like just a waste at the moment to me since the silicon shortages are just growing around the globe. Why even release new SKUs in the first place until the supply can meet demand? I'm sure the answer is something like -We can't stop development and release scheduling just because the parts aren't all there. After all, companies like Nvidia and AMD aren't the only ones using silicon. In fact, I would wager that they aren't even the biggest users of silicon out there. Virtually everything own now has a "smart" chip in it to listen to our requests, plan routes for driving, answer phone calls from our wrist watch, track our steps, record our TV shows, manage our refrigerator temperatures, etc etc. It's no surprise we're short on CPU's and GPU's. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking though. At this point I'm more interested in buying another mountain bike, but there are shortages there as well. What a world.
Speaking of which, I'm going to leave you with this super fun video from Shimano about trail dogs and I'll get to what we're playing below that. Enjoy your weekend everyone.
What are we playing this weekend?
AJ: Kicking off May with some Tomb Raider and Forza 5 (and I might also try out Super Lucky's Tale).
Greywolfe: magic: arena. and very seriously trying hand of fate, again. i bailed on it when one of the last bosses pushed the envelope of awful design that absolutely hated the player, but i now own a copy of hand of fate 2, so i want to at least be familiar with the first game before trying the second.
Scrooloose: Outriders for me. I've been lucky not to have the issues others have. I will say though that the end game play is a completely different experience than the rest of the game. It's all about speed and damage output rather than tactics and survivability.
Yoda: [I'm going to assume Yoda is playing Black Desert Online as I write this even now and that's why he hasn't submitted his WRUP contribution this week]