CURRENT GAME THREAD

[Santilli]

Hi
I hardly ever play games.
That said, the current gaming market is new, different, and crazy.
I'm after a first person, stand alone shooter, that doesn't require steam, or works.

That said, what does anyone play,, what do they think of the current games, and what suggestions do you have?

So far, I'm still on Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare...

If you want to suggest something, please tell how to get it, disk, download,etc.
How much it costs, and how good the support is.
Thank you, in advance

 

[Santilli]

Call of Duty/Quake/Far Cry/Halo: combat evolve/Cyberpunk 2077/Prey/Doom Eternal/Fear/Halflife 2/Bioshock/Titan Fall 2/Wolfenstient:The New Order/World of Warships/

 

[Santilli]

Trepang2/Selaco/Witchfire
????????????????????

 

[Mercutio]

The games industry has sucked a lot of fun out of games in general.

You might do well to look at the genre called Boomer Shooters. These are meant to be 90s shooter throwbacks, so everything is fast and the fun is finding all the new weapons and powerups. Ion Fury, Amid Evil and Dusk are some better examples of the genre.

I almost always deal with Gog but since my partner is more of a gamer than I am, there is Steam in the house now. Xbox Game Pass is also relevant to the discussion. She's playing Atomfall right now, which is a Fallout/Oblivion-style first person title.

 

[Santilli]

Thank you for the suggestions.

 

[Mercutio]

Mullet Madjack is complete insanity. Doom on crack. You just run down halls. You have 10 seconds to kill somebody. You can do melee kills or environmental kills or just shoot everything, but something has to die or else you do. And it's all set to 16-bit, Patrick Nagel neon graphics with a synthwave score.

Neon White is an FPS shooty parkour title where a big part of the fun is in your freedom of movement. Nadia loves it and I think it's great fun to watch.

Levels of both these games take under 60 seconds to finis and you can buy them both for around $15 each.

 

[sedrosken]

Selaco is flat out running in the GZDoom engine. Zortch is another boomer shooter I enjoy. You might also like Ultrakill, but that can get pretty difficult and the visuals might be a bit... much at times. The Nightdive ports of Powerslave, Blood, Quake/Quake II, and Doom/Doom 2 are also all very good. I think they might have done some other ports -- maybe a Duke3D anniversary thing, maybe Shadow Warrior? I'm not sure.

Of course if you own the data for Doom/2 already you can get some mileage out of a source port like GZDoom. Lots and lots and lots of mods available. Some particular ones I like are Colorful Hell paired with Maps of Chaos, Reelism 2, The Golden Souls 1 and 2, and The Adventures of Square, a total conversion that's actually available separately I think for free.

 

[Mercutio]

My partner repurchased the Oblivion Remaster on Steam and PS5 last night. She has it through Xbox Game Pass as well. She then spent all evening complaining that she couldn't play it because she was downloading it on all three platforms.
The game is $60/platform and there's no doubt in my mind that it still has all the same bugs it had 20 years ago. I think being a fan of the Bethesda games produced by Todd Howard collectively have Stockholm Masochism.

Also, in spite what I'd guess are the approximately infinite resources Microsoft and Sony could devote to internet bandwidth, the Steam download finished first and it wasn't even close.

 

[sedrosken]

Hearing that it was still unmodified Gamebryo underneath made me shrug and go back to playing my heavily modded copy of the original release. The vanilla game is utterly broken in many ways and I refuse to go back to those mechanics regardless of what graphics pack has been thrown on top.

 

[Handruin]

I've been having a bunch of fun playing Schedule 1 with friends. It's an indie game from a single developer and it's surprisingly well done so far. It may be on other platforms for those allergic to steam

Schedule I on Steam

From small-time dope pusher to kingpin - manufacture and distribute a range of drugs throughout the grungy city of Hyland Point. Expand your empire with properties, businesses, employees and more.

store.steampowered.com

 

[sedrosken]

I was going to wait for a sale to pick it up but I got a steam gift card sitting around so I grabbed it. I'm glad I did, it's lots of fun. My friends are constantly making "we need to cook" references now.

 

[Santilli]

OK. I hate Steam.
Trying to put my old stuff on this computer, and 11, didn't really work. Haven't figured out what software screwed it up yet, but I will.

Any suggestions? or how to set it up so it gives me information I can do something, based on it?

 

[Santilli]

I got side tracked. The original question I wanted to pose:
IF YOU WERE GOING TO BUILD A COMPUTER TO PLAY VINTAGE GAMES, WHAT WINDOWS WOULD YOU USE?
WHAT HARDWARE WOULD YOU USE?

I'M LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO PLAY Oregon Trail 1,2,3,4,5
Call of Duty, Modern Warfare
United Offfensive, expansion pack
Finest Hour
Unreal Tournament 2004, (though this runs well on my current machine)
And any other great games you like.?

 

[Mercutio]

OK. I hate Steam.
Trying to put my old stuff on this computer, and 11, didn't really work. Haven't figured out what software screwed it up yet, but I will.
View attachment 1748
Any suggestions? or how to set it up so it gives me information I can do something, based on it?

Inconsistent Power State usually means that a device that the system should be running normally isn't doing that. For these purposes, "device" might mean a software device, possibly even Norton AV, if any part of it is still installed. But it could also be a buggy graphics/audio/NIC driver or just crappy power management software. They don't give you a whole lot to go on.

You might try turning off Hibernate (Admin Powershell/cmd then powercfg hibernate off) and/or disabling Sleep to see if those things ameliorate your issue. You could also do a fresh Windows install from original media to keep all the Norton slop off your computer.

I also dislike Steam but it isn't the problem here. There's a buggy driver somewhere.

 

[Mercutio]

I got side tracked. The original question I wanted to pose:
IF YOU WERE GOING TO BUILD A COMPUTER TO PLAY VINTAGE GAMES, WHAT WINDOWS WOULD YOU USE?
WHAT HARDWARE WOULD YOU USE?

Vintage is extremely subjective but I've been talking people through retro-gaming setups with either Lenovo Thinkcentre 720q Tiny PCs (i3/i5 7th gen Intel) for around $125 or Beelink Ser5 Ryzen 5800u CPUs that cost around $250. Put Batocera Linux on them, which is basically a front end to RetroPie. Retropie will cover you for anything DOS-era and is a front end for most stand up, console and older personal computers (e.g. Amiga). The older systems can handle PS2 and some Gamecube games while the Beelink can do most PS3 titles and Wii/Switch.

I work with some guys who run a woodworking shop at my local community center to put together bar top arcade cabinets out of MDF for people who can afford the project and otherwise I help people take cast-off laptops or tiny PCs plus cheap gamepads to get to the same place.

You could also use either Bazzite or the official SteamOS Recovery image to set up a contemporary non-Windows OS that can be made to run lots and lots of stuff either natively or by emulation, with the odd caveat that SteamOS has its best support with AMD hardware. Something like a Ryzen 5600X, Radeon RX 6600 or 5700, 16GB RAM and 1 - 2TB of storage is a pretty sweet spot for 1080p contemporary gaming. There are some down sides to this, since not every game works through Proton and some games, particularly those with anticheat systems like LoL and Valorant, are arguably hostile to running on Linux in the first place. The PC I'm describing is a ~$500 system, something that's very much in line with what Xbox and PS5s cost.

Trying to keep old Windows running well is kind of a pain, especially once your system is so old that mainstream browsers no longer install. Windows versions don't matter very much to me, but given the end date for Windows 10 support, if you want to play contemporary games on Windows, you really have to accept that Windows 11 is going to be part of your life going forward. It'll be a while before Chrome and Firefox stop working on Windows 10 and I'm sure that won't happen the same day Microsoft stops its support, but you can assume it'll happen sooner rather than later. Steam is basically the monoculture of PC gaming, and it is basically a Chromium web browser. The day Chromium isn't getting updates for your Windows OS is the day Steam stops working on it. This is a pretty decent reason to give PC gaming on Linux another look, all on its own.

On another gaming thread, I brought up ExoDOS project and its various libraries. Depending on how Retro you want to go, the ~11TB of files it has may be relevant to your interests. Since most of the titles there are either DOS or Windows 3.1 games, they'll run on a goddamned potato if you need them to.

You might also want to look at PCem if you are looking for accurate emulation of specific hardware, if for example you'd like to play Descent on an emulated Pentium 133 with a 3dfx Voodoo and a Gravis Ultrasound instead of just running it in DOSbox like some kind of CHUD.

 

[Santilli]

Inconsistent Power State usually means that a device that the system should be running normally isn't doing that. For these purposes, "device" might mean a software device, possibly even Norton AV, if any part of it is still installed. But it could also be a buggy graphics/audio/NIC driver or just crappy power management software. They don't give you a whole lot to go on.

You might try turning off Hibernate (Admin Powershell/cmd then powercfg hibernate off) and/or disabling Sleep to see if those things ameliorate your issue. You could also do a fresh Windows install from original media to keep all the Norton slop off your computer.

I also dislike Steam but it isn't the problem here. There's a buggy driver somewhere.

That's done.

 

[Santilli]

Thank you. I did do a clean install, from a Disc, so is the Norton s...t on the disk, or is it coming in on the upgrade? Think maybe the later?

 

[sedrosken]

I got side tracked. The original question I wanted to pose:
IF YOU WERE GOING TO BUILD A COMPUTER TO PLAY VINTAGE GAMES, WHAT WINDOWS WOULD YOU USE?
WHAT HARDWARE WOULD YOU USE?

I'M LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO PLAY Oregon Trail 1,2,3,4,5
Call of Duty, Modern Warfare
United Offfensive, expansion pack
Finest Hour
Unreal Tournament 2004, (though this runs well on my current machine)
And any other great games you like.?

That sounds like peak XP era to me, aside from the earliest Oregon Trails. Those you can run with an emulator for your platform of choice. Something like a Core2 or Sandy bridge box would be free on up to extremely cheap and do the job fine -- literally, any of them would do the trick, perfectly fine. Your cutoff is Ivy Bridge. Haswell ditches XP for drivers I believe. Don't pay more than fifty bucks for one; honestly, they should be paying you to dispose of their e-waste.

The Quadro 2000 is a fermi-era low power card with plenty of oomph for just about anything you would want XP for as opposed to being able to run it identically on Windows 7 or so. They are also very cheap to acquire. I think I paid eleven dollars for mine. I paid more than that for my lunch today.

You can leverage Legacy Update and stuff like Supermium or New Moon for browsers, but if you're looking for a single player experience, XP can natively use flash drives, so my personal recommendation is to keep it off the network. Do as I say, not as I do: I am insane.

XP will still run GOG installers, but Steam is a no-go just completely. Don't bother trying, it will not work.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm 99% sure Haswell is good for XP support. Haswell E, not so much, but anything that does DDR3 is a decent marker for the cutoff. Unused H81 motherboards aren't THAT hard to find, but it's probably easier to find an old fleet desktop than put something together from parts.

 

[sedrosken]

You're right upon further examination -- Haswell indeed does support XP, albeit with earlier drivers. There were Skylake boards and machines -- particularly OEM ones -- that made use of DDR3 so I'd hesitate to use DDR3 RAM as your discriminator, but in general that's a decent enough rule to follow. You will need an F6 driver for your SATA as IIRC you lose IDE mode support in a lot of later firmware -- you may do better slipstreaming the driver into your XP install media with nLite, which is still available as a free download.

 

[Mercutio]

I actually built that low-spec build last night. Ryzen 3600X, 16GB DDR4, RX 5700XT. The whole PC is worth MAYBE $350. I set it up on Fedora 42 and used Heroic launcher to get Gog and Epic titles on it and everything was nice and smooth at 1080p. I have no complaints. I don't have a Steam library of my own so I didn't bother with Bazzite/SteamOS, but as a proof of concept I'm pretty happy with it. Baldur's Gate 3, Bioshock and Doom (2016) all worked beautifully. Stadia and Xbox controllers paired just fine when I tried them. I got 5.1 audio from HDMI from the moment I plugged the system into my TV. Fortnite didn't work because of its anticheat nonsense but since I'm a Prime subscriber, all I needed to do about that was change the user agent on Chrome to fire it up via Amazon Luna.

We're conditioned to think that we need an absurd PC to play games but no part of that PC is absurd. I built it out of sketchy used parts. The worst part of the experience was trying to use it as a couch gaming setup, but that's not natural in the way I would choose to game anyway.

I do think that there's a missing puzzle piece for couch PC gaming that basically nothing on the PC side does HDMI-CEC. We can't just hit a button on an input device and have a screen turn on and our inputs set properly. Someone probably makes something for that, but hopefully as consoles get closer to real computers, that support will trickle down to proper hardware as well.

 

[sedrosken]

My guess is that once the Xbox exits the market and Microsoft fully recommits to the PC, they'll sell a kit (a la their old Media Center TV remote/receiver kit) or a software bit/bob that'll enable that support for supported GPUs. I can't imagine it won't happen without some kind of licensing fee since not everyone will make use of it.

 

[Mercutio]

Looks like the products do exist, at least in the form of a Pulse 8 CEC Injector. Unfortunately, they don't work with high bandwidth setups, so if you have a TV fancy enough to do 12 bit HDR or 120Hz refresh at 4k, they're glitchy. There's also a real annoyance in spending $50 on a device just to avoid having to pick up a second remote.

OpenGamePadUI seems to be a decent 10' interface for contemporary Linux systems.

 

[Mercutio]

I got somewhere with a $15 voice command capable IR transmitter since the only thing I need is for the AVR and TV to toggle on, but it's a little janky and maybe 20% of the time it doesn't turn one or the other device on when I tell it to. My LG TV doesn't have a physical power button either. I'm not sure who decided that TVs don't need power buttons anymore but I wish that person a very get fucked with a knife.

Since I have the hardware to do it, my proof of concept system got switched to a R7 9700X and Radeon 6900XT, enough hardware that the sorts of games I play are probably fine in 4k if I want.