GWJ Conference Call Episode 624

Nintendo Switch Online NES Games, Bard's Tale IV, closing the door on Wow and even more Spider-Man. Also, 'Do gaming upgrades matter as much as they once did?', your emails & more!

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This week Cory, Amanda, Sean & Michael prove they are old people in discussing whether having the hottest, newest tech means as much as it once did.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind.

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Show credits

Sponsors: 

Production By Jonathan Downin
(With help this week from Cory!)

Comments

00:02:42 Nintendo Switch Online
00:12:49 Marvel's Spider-Man
00:19:05 World of Warcraft
00:23:03 The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep
00:38:20 Do Gaming Upgrades Still Matter?
01:05:30 Your Emails

What was the song before the emails? I swear it had this "Sesame Street theme, but cyberpunk" vibe to it.

Cory plugged in the music this week. I'll get him to send me the links.

Uh okay, so we had some audio editing issues this week and TL;DR I had to do the edit. And I don't have access to most of the interstitial music that Jonathan uses. So I made my own.

Well that's not entirely true. They're clips of music I've been working on from the past year or so. Demos and little song sketches and stuff like that. I did the same thing on the Soundtracks episode.

This week, they're both covers I started but never finished. The first track was me trying to cover "Europa and the Pirate Twins" by Thomas Dolby. The second is me trying to cover "Monkey" by Low. Neither are finished, obvs, but I panicked when I had to finish the edit Tuesday night.

The clips in the Soundtrack episode (Ep. 607) are original.

Happy to share if anyone wants them. Maybe I should, you know, finish something I start for a change.

I don't like Goldeneye either.

The Venn diagram of people interested in talking about gin and Nintendo is me. Just sayin'.

Re: upgrades. I built a whole new PC to play VR games. I can't remember the last time I piecemeal upgraded my PC though. I also looked at the reviews and articles about nVidia's new offerings, but no one printed anything that said "This is decisively better! It makes the 1080 look like a butt!" I'm on a 980TI, which is a pretty nice card even if it's now two generations old. So far the only thing I've had to turn down graphics on was Shadow of War, so I'll probably sit this GPU generation out too.

I think this is also influenced by the existence of my SSD. Guys, look... my load times are really good. I run everything off my 1TB SSD. I no longer look at long loading screens and think "How can I throw more processing power at this so it moves faster?" Mostly I think "Man, I wonder what that loading tip said." So if I have to turn off dynamic shadows or something, I'm still pretty happy. Maybe this year I'll throw something at the machine that changes my opinion, but I wouldn't bet on it.

(I'm also the 1-console guy. I hate paying for $500 DRM machines. That's all I'll say about that.)

PS mini and N64 mini (man, I am full of opinions today). I think the PS games are actually pretty easy to play. I just got a PSP Go off e-bay exclusively so I can download PS One Classics and play them during my commute. If I were inclined to use less legitimate methods, there's a ton of PSX titles that will apparently run just fine on my Android cell phone. And my desktop, or laptop, or I could just get a RasPi 3B+ and load RetroPie on it. PSX games are pretty highly accessible. N64, on the other hand, is apparently a pain in the rear to emulate. So I think there's more demand for that than there is a PSX mini. Unless the PS mini ends up being loaded with stuff that hasn't already been rereleased elsewhere, but that doesn't seem to be the case so far.

Also, as weird as this seems, one console generation is a long time ago. I'm not saying there will be a PS3 mini, but a PS2 is ancient history at this point. For all the talk about backwards compatibility, there's not a ton of it readily available. PS4 doesn't play any old PS# titles. If someone greenlit an all-in-one that had Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, Silent Hill 2, GTA 3 (or Vice City), Kingdom Hearts, and God Of War on it... people would be into that. Some of those games are easily accessible now, but not all of them are. The PS2 launched in 2000 (it's old enough to graduate from high school this year). The PS3 launched in 2006 (I think it's in 6th grade, guys). It's basically been 12 years since we had easy access to the PS2 library (minus some launch edition PS3s that could run it).

The list of PAX games, as promised.

My rig's about 5 years old, but dang if it'll run Battletech. I'm not upgrading though, because mortgage. It just drives me further into the everlovin arms of my ps4 and D:OS 2

Upgrades are always about capability, for me. What am I going to be able to do that I can't do now? What bang am I going to get for my buck?

I upgraded my (at the time) 5 year old laptop with integrated graphics because it wouldn't run much of anything that wasn't turn based. I played through XCOM on that machine at single-digit framerates, because eh, it's turn based, it doesn't matter.

The desktop I upgraded to was built to give me capabilities I didn't have before: VR, racing sims, and 1440p. So far, it's doing an A+ job at those. I don't see myself springing for a new guts for it until it stops doing what I ask of it. Maybe that'll be when I happen upon a 4K monitor. Or a fancier VR rig that makes it chug. Or it just up and dies.

There's an element of budget too. It took two years after buying the VR-capable rig to actually get a nerd helmet. Why then? Because I got an unexpected windfall that put a lot of play-money in my wallet.

Great episode! I wanted to jump in with some writing on Bard's Tale IV I did for Syfy. It definitely had a buggy launch, but I think there's a real gem there. The interview I did with David Rogers of inXile was fantastic and he had a lot to say about the design decisions. Its been interesting hearing his rationale behind certain things (like the save system) before seeing the criticism of those decisions.

As far as upgrades, my most recent was a 1080 video card earlier this year. Some regrets, actually. I think I was spooked a bit by the crypto-driven price spike so I bought it when prices fell to Earth again. I do have an ultrawide monitor and I was concerned about filling it up with Battlefield 1, but I haven't actually played much BF1 since that purchase. So I could have kept my powder dry and jumped on the 1180 six months later.

Was it easy to install? ...It turns out it didn't quite fit with the drive cage in my several-year-old case. So I bought a Dremel and got to have the fun of cutting that cage out. And now I own a Dremel, which is neat.

Demiurge wrote:

Uh okay, so we had some audio editing issues this week and TL;DR I had to do the edit. And I don't have access to most of the interstitial music that Jonathan uses. So I made my own.

Thanks for jumping in to do the edit. The voice levels were pretty off in the beginning, not sure if that is something you can fix in the future? Like you and Sean were pretty loud and then Michael was whisper quiet. I kept having to adjust the volume so I could hear him and then you guys came in yelling.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Demiurge wrote:

Uh okay, so we had some audio editing issues this week and TL;DR I had to do the edit. And I don't have access to most of the interstitial music that Jonathan uses. So I made my own.

Thanks for jumping in to do the edit. The voice levels were pretty off in the beginning, not sure if that is something you can fix in the future? Like you and Sean were pretty loud and then Michael was whisper quiet. I kept having to adjust the volume so I could hear him and then you guys came in yelling. :)

Yeah, this was pretty jarring. Had to give up listening on my way to work in the car. Just couldn't afford to dedicate the attention to constantly adjusting audio levels. Glad to hear it might clear up further on.

GoldenEye was an absolutely great game at the time that it came out, but now it just isn't.

I have a 1070 and during the BFV beta was relatively steady around 80FPS, but with the 2080 the tests are showing that it can be almost double and PUBG tested out at 200FPS. Having that high of a FPS that doesn't yoyo is a competitive edge. I was just about to buy a 1080ti because the prices dropped, but with the announcement decided to get the 2080 instead.

ranalin wrote:

I have a 1070 and during the BFV beta was relatively steady around 80FPS, but with the 2080 the tests are showing that it can be almost double and PUBG tested out at 200FPS. Having that high of a FPS that doesn't yoyo is a competitive edge. I was just about to buy a 1080ti because the prices dropped, but with the announcement decided to get the 2080 instead.

I'd love for someone to sit me down and show me games running at different fps at those kind of high levels. I honestly couldn't tell you which of the game's I played recently were 30 fps and which were 60. I can tell when the fps are inconsistent and all...but I can't imagine what 200 fps looks like, or know if I would even notice the difference.

Ok, glad I wasn't the only one who noticed issues with the audio. I could barely hear anyone after the first few minutes.

Super LTTP but I thought the music was great, Cory! Really liked the one for the outdo, it gave me a Bastion vibe.

Zenke going on about Alliance being neglected in WoW was hilarious, in a way, I almost cheered when Amanda jumped in. Like... really? XD