I got Shantae: Half - Genie Hero Ultimate Edition. It was included this month with Stadia Pro. I got the standard version when it came out on Xbox One, but I sort of like this one better.
Got a Nintendo Switch OLED bundle from Costco for my son who is 5 years old for Christmas. We bought the following games: Mario Kart 8 Mario Odyssey Zelda Breath of the Wild Metroid Dread Sonic Frontier The Costco bundle wasn't anything amazing. Came with a 128GB microSD, screen protector, case, and 12 months of Nintendo online. I mostly wanted to get it from Costco because they're great about replacing stuff when it breaks. Also picked up two Nintendo Pro controllers because I don’t like the joy cons. He seems to prefer the joy cons to the controller. He’s played Minecraft, Roblox, and some of the old Sonic games on PC, but this is his first console.
I picked up like 10 free games for the Switch and paid a couple bucks for a few others during the holiday deals. Mostly Indy stuff I’ll never play.
I picked up Rocket League. It was free and he already plays it on PC. We're using the Switch 100% docked for now. He throws controllers when he gets frustrated. I don't trust him not to chuck it across the room. But he's 5. So pretty much what I would expect for his age.
Yeah my son has broken 1 keyboard, 3 mice, 2 pair of headphones, his laptop screen, and the monitor used to replace the broken laptop screen. It was all cheap Chinese crap, but I make him buy his own stuff now. I try to tell him just because some haxor spawn camper kills you 10 times doesn't mean you get to break stuff.
I think my wife is more excited by the Switch than anyone. She spent all day yesterday playing Mario Odyssey. She was still going at 2am when I fell asleep.
I'm playing beyond two souls on the Steam Deck. It was on sale and thought why not Sent from my ASUS_AI2201_C using Tapatalk
Skyward Sword on the Switch I am one of the few people who seems to enjoy this game, takes a bit of getting used to on the Switch without the Wii motion controls but good fun again once you manage to. I miss this Zelda style game, really disliked BotW as it was too barren and I missed the getting new items to unlock new areas that normal Zelda games have. Will probably still pick up BotW 2 though in the hope some of it comes back.
I picked up a key for Hogwarts Legacy for PC for ~$45 on CDkeys. I'm not really much of a Harry Potter fan, but the bits of footage I've seen of the game world looked interesting. I saw that it also has widescreen and FSR2 confirmed, so it should look and run decently well for me. Maybe. The Ultra settings are practically a match of my actual hardware, the 5800x and the next step up from the recommended 6800XT, the 6900XT. I'm hoping it is actually a good game.
I've had my eye on that game. I'm not even interested in the gameplay so much, but getting to explore that world is kind of appealing.
I'm getting my PlayStation fighting collection back together again. I found these two gems at GameStop about an hour ago. That's about the only genre that I'm really good at.
The regular version releases on the 10th. You have to buy the special edition to play early, which I am not paying extra to do. ACG gave a pretty glowing review and noted the world was very impressive, which is what already had me interested. Hopefully it will get an early patch to address stuttering while I wait for my code on the 10th.
Hogswarts Legacy early tech impressions: I haven't unlocked flying on the broom yet, but early on with a 5800x and 6900XT with Ultra settings/ 5120 x 1440/ FSR2 Quality I've been getting around 70 to 100 fps indoors in the castle and maybe 60 to 80 outside so far. Given I've got a much stronger than average CPU/ GPU combo, I dropped from Ultra to High while in the open world and my frame rate increased from 63 fps to around 73 to 80. I'm sure you can get a moderately recent card running it at much more sensible settings than what I'm using. I would note that it seems this game is pretty memory hungry. If your video card has a smaller pool of VRAM, the benchmarks suggested that hurts the performance quite a bit. In the Hogsmeade area, a decent sized town, it ran in the low 60s to 70s on both High and Ultra. It didn't seem to matter much there. They may need to do some work on that area. It's not quite as demanding as I expected as long as you have something like FSR or DLSS on. However, ray tracing from what I've seen in benchmarks decimates frame rates and is a pass for me. Even Nvidia cards had their frame rates cut in half by ray tracing and it's not in the playable range on AMD cards. Not worth bothering with currently. It seems to be what Ubersampling was in The Witcher 2, looks 3% better but cuts your frame rate in half. No thanks. Another irritating issue is my choices are only Windowed or Fullscreen Windowed. This means not only am I probably losing a bit of performance not having a Fullscreen option but also HDR is inactive, screwing up my color palate. I've read speculation this has something to do with DX12 issues. It probably won't affect most people as much because almost everyone on PC is using SDR. I'm quite irritated about it but expect this will eventually be fixed with a patch. The game looks very good both indoors and outside. I'm not a big Harry Potter fan (indifferent, not for or against), so I'm sure I'm missing lots of things there as far as content from the HP books. Ironically with all the protesting from the woke cultists raging over J.K. Rowling, it looks like some diversity officer had a checklist for every character in this game. It introduces African, Indian, ect. characters with heavy accents within the the opening of the game. The demographics of the game look like what the protesters would insist on so far if they were actually interested in video games and were employed so they could buy a machine to play it.
I'm not sure if the game is really unoptimized for PC or not, but it does seem to love VRAM. Ultra needs 12GB for 1440p and 16GB for 4K. There are also some issues with Nvidia cards getting CPU limited in Hogsmead at lower resolutions resulting in worse performance than AMD, even with ray tracing on. My 5700XT 8GB can play it but I'll have to drop a lot of setting to high or lower.
As someone who is looking for a new GPU, this is the benchmark that concerns me. The 3070 8GB and 3080 10GB are getting smoked by a 3060 12GB at 1080P Ultra with RT on. This game just obsoleted every RT card with less than 10GB VRAM. Even the 6800XT 16GB which is about 50% slower than the 3080 at RT is now twice as fast because of the extra VRAM. How long until 12GB of VRAM isn't enough?
I've been saying all along that anything less than 16GB of VRAM for this generation is going to be a mistake. It's why I haven't bought a card yet. Anyone who bought something like an 8GB 3060ti, 3070, 3070 ti basically threw their money away. Those cards are going to perform like shit once the big games from this gen start to hit. They just don't have enough VRAM. 12GB is borderline. People who bought the 3080 10GB got scammed bad. The general rule is that you always need at least as much VRAM as the consoles have total RAM (and ideally you should have more). This gen that's 16GB, last gen it was 8GB, gen before that it was 512MB, gen before that it was 64MB. Cards that have less always fare poorly in the long run. Every gen there are deniers claiming that you won't need the extra VRAM. They always turn out to be wrong. Until mainstream 16-32GB cards are a thing I'm not even going to bother. This is two game generations in a row where nvidia has been running early generation scams with cards that are totally gimped on VRAM. Anyone who bought the 3GB 780 Ti or 10GB 3080 got screwed so bad. I know better at this point and will be holding out for the real cards.