+1 for the Syndicate Satellite Reign recommendation.
It’s so obviously a Syndicate update (without having the rights to the license) that it’s pretty endearing.
Sure, some bits of it are wonky (I’ve had a couple of crashes, some truly bizarre bugs and some of the mechanics don’t quite play well with others) but if you enjoyed Syndicate, it’s very easy to overlook those flaws and get a great nostalgia buzz out of it.
BATTLETECH (apparently it has to be in all caps) is about to go live on Steam. I Kickstarted it approximately 78 years ago, it feels like. It’s been preloading since yesterday afternoon, and, I hope, will be ready for me after work today. (For some reason, I’m only getting about 150K/second when I just downloaded For The King a few days ago at 4.8G/second… thanks bunches Charter.)
I have a couple of fond memories of ridiculously slow, overnight, but intriguing, Battletech brawls at cons in my college days. I hope this game captures the same magic of complicated heat management rules and funny-looking character sheets with lots of bubbles to fill in. 
Battletech is pretty good! It’s teaching me that I know very little about Battletech tactics and better learn fast if I don’t want to burn through my light mechs like popcorn.
And it’s the second game I’ve ever played that let you choose “they/them/their” pronouns for your character (and make a very androgynous portrait if you like… or an angry grandma, or an anime pretty-boy, or whatever – quite a diverse set of looks).
Dropped in a new video card in my PC and now I can finally play this game at more than 17 FPS, yay!
I’ve not read you’re spoilered text but am aware of the controversy and having barely begun the game it does not waste any time letting you know where it stands.
Considering the way video card prices have been inflated lately… I’m sorry for your wallet’s loss.
It’s insane! I put my old video card up for sale and spent a couple of weeks looking for a deal and any card at a “reasonable” price was snapped up as soon as it was posted.
Wound up going for an only slightly overprices gt 1030 because I just couldn’t justify spending twice as much for only slightly better performance.
I got hit by the inflation of memory prices when I finally upgraded my computer to a Ryzen 2700X just recently, so I know the feeling. 
On the plus side… it’s been almost exactly a decade since I last upgraded, and I went from a cinebench score of 298 to 1776 with the upgrade (yeah, I benchmarked first… wanted to make sure I had data). And that’s using the same video card, and before doing any overclocking other than telling the motherboard how to find the correct memory timings. Even the OpenGL test got a huge boost in framerate from the change.
The difference is night & day on things like games or ripping DVDs…
I’m still playing through Okami. Good grief, but this game is long if you make any sort of attempt at getting any of the various sets of collectibles in it (and even more so if you’re trying to be a completionist). I have almost 60 hours of play on my save game currently. Still enjoying the heck out of it.
The main criticism I’d have about it is that too many of the conversations are either unskippable or have a delay before you can skip them. This got to be extremely annoying in one situation where I was forced to interact with the same character over and over in an area, and the character had the same long dialog every time… and in part of the conversation, another character even comments that “haven’t we heard all of this already?” Much later on I realized that you can sometimes skip those sections, but you need to hit the start button while in the conversation, wait for it to (maybe) give you a prompt to skip, then hit the start button again. I really wish they’d streamlined that control method a bit more.
Can you suggest any good resources for an absolute beginner looking to overclock/properly configure an I-3770k? Everything I have found so far is written in such poor English that I’m terrified of frying something because the instructions were unclear.
I bought my PC second hand and it has a huge heatsink on the CPU but I’ve since reflashed the bios and it’s running at default clockspeed. The CPU is definitely bottlenecking performance for me but it’s the best that will fit on the mobo and it seems like a shame to not make proper use of the heatsink…
To be honest, I’m an absolute beginner on it myself. I’m mainly considering doing some small amount of overclocking on the Ryzen because they seem to have made it dead simple (well, as simple as you can get when you’re pushing things past the warrantied speeds/voltages…).
One of the places I’ve been looking for information is Tom’s Hardware, and it looks like they have an article that may cover what you’re looking for. From what I’ve gathered, a lot of it depends on the motherboard you’re using, and how far you want to try to push things…
You are a gentleperson and a scholar. Thank you!
I look forward to potentially bricking my rig tomorrow… 
Remember start small and step it up in increments.
That was significantly less complicated than I expected.
Core clock speed up from 3.5 to 4.6ghz and stable, with a corresponding 25% increase in performance in 3D Mark. It’s still an old CPU but that should reduce the bottleneck a bit.
Now I am going to stress test it by playing 6 hours of Nier: Automata. For science!
Ugh. I made the mistake of downloading the 3D Mark demo through Steam before my upgrade to try to get some comparison performance numbers with it. Tried a few of the tests, but they all apparently would crash at random points through their run, with nothing but a “there was a problem” error message.
Then, after fighting with that a bit, I gave up… and that’s when I discovered that the thing has achievements. In benchmarking software! For things like submitting a benchmark score with specific digits in it, or submitting an impossibly high score…! So, that’ll be another 0% completed entry in my library.
(And, I just now spotted a review of it that mentions that it doesn’t have support for the processor in my old system. Woulda been nice to know that beforehand…)
This idea of achievements for benchmarking software is pretty horrific but Steam achievements (and PlayStation trophies for that matter) never quite grabbed me as much as the Xbox gamerscore thing did. There’s something about having your score directly under your gamertag that makes getting pointless points really compelling. I bought the original Xbox and the 360 on the days they were released but I’m happy that I am now free of the ecosystem.
3D Mark was appealing because the CPU benchmark is an absolute monster and because it also tests the GPU at the same time, so I could make sure that nothing else was being negatively impacted as I made the adjustments.
After a long day of “stress testing”, I’m pleased to say that Nier runs at a constant 10-15 fps faster than before I overclocked. I didn’t think it would make that much difference but it’s gone from 35-45 fps to a constant 45-60, which makes a world of difference in a twitchy fighting game. Thanks again, for steering me in the right direction.
There’s a slight smell of ozone in the air in my living room, but that’s normal, right…?
It’s all good 'til you let out the blue smoke.
I don’t generally get wound up about them, but it’s sometimes fun to get every one that’s available in a good game. Though, it gets a little aggravating when games (or anything else) that I didn’t like end up dragging down my “Completion Rate”.
On the bright side, while doing a little digging around on something unrelated, I saw that the general consensus seems to be that games don’t count until you get at least one achievement in them. Since I was never in any danger of getting any of the achievements for 3DMark, I’ll just make sure not to use the Steam version in the future. And since it for some reason seems to have vanished out of my library since the upgrade, that shouldn’t be a problem…
I have to say, I have a slight Pavlovian response to the “ding” you get when a Playstation trophy unlocks. Some years back I made it my SMS tone so I could feel a sense of achievement whenever someone messaged me 
Ding social master trophy!
Finished the base games campaign on the witcher 3. Dlc next then maybe prey.