Video Games Thread

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That Yaw VR kickstarter ended up raising $219,281 in the end which is quite impressive. I think I'm going to get one next year if there are decent reviews for it after it releases in August. Hopefully by next year they'll have got the price down. It's still VERY cheap compared to other motion simulators but it's still a bit too rich for my blood.

It's an absolutely outstanding piece of engineering even before you start to think about it being collapsible, portable and lightweight. I hope these guys make a small fortune out of this.

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Fuck me ragged with a wire brush

There have only been 112m or so systems discovered by pilots in Elite Dangerous so far, there are over 400b systems in the Milky Way altogether.



Only 0.028% of the systems so far. The scale of this game is just fucking crazy.

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Whoops! All Oculus Rift headsets are currently unusable due to a security certificate for a DLL being out of date lol

Someone at Oculus is getting the sack over this lmfao

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They've fixed the problem now and are giving everyone a $15 Store credit. Should be a tenner in pound sterling I think.

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Skyrim VR is being released on Steam on 3rd April, but seeing how much Bethesda and id fucked up Fallout 4 VR and Doom VFR I'm not getting my hopes up too high. One thing that might do the game a few favours is having the PS4 as the lead platform so it's passed Sony's Standards testing. The PSVR SKU was supposed to be excellent.

If it's any good I can see myself spending A LOT of time in this game.

In the meantime I'm playing the shit out of Elite Dangerous. Have just got myself a Viper Mk IV, am kicking some serious pirate scum arse at the moment to make a few quid.

Will be getting an Asp Explorer at some point and do some exploring outside of the bubble.

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HTC have officially gone insane. They're releasing the Vive Pro in April for $799/£799 for just the headset lol. So anyone buying one that doesn't already own a Vive will have to buy 2 controllers and 2 base stations. And they're expensive. The controllers are £119.99 each and the base stations are also £119.99 each. So a full system will cost you £1278.96.

I think they're primarily aiming this headset for VR Arcades but even then a lot of them would see that £799 headset only deal being too expensive.

And it's not as if these headsets have the highest resolution either, the Samsung Odyssey is also a 1.5K headset.

And people wonder why HTC have been on the verge of going out of business these last few years. Pure insanity from the HTC board thinking this is a good idea.

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Have gone from Harmless->Mostly Harmless->Novice->Competent now for Combat in Elite Dangerous with my new Cmdr I started the other week. Only another 5 rankings before I become Elite but it's going to take me AGES. To get experience points you have to kill pilots higher ranked than you otherwise you don't get points for the kills. Am 6% of the way through Competent now.

Think I'm going to buy an Asp Explorer next and work on my Exploration rank by going outside the human bubble once I have enough cash to buy one and kit it out. The crazy thing is that there's still plenty of systems INSIDE the bubble that are still unexplored

Over 400 billion systems out there in the Milky Way altogether, the sheer scale of this game is bloody mental lol

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Plenty of positive hands-on reports of the Oculus Go at the GDC so far. No interest in getting one myself but I can see Oculus selling a shitload of these things this year. The displays and optics sound shit hot which bodes well for the Rift CV2 next year.

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Oops! Got my ship a bit banged up whilst bounty hunting and all of a sudden things started to go fucking CRAZY. I was taking heat damage and all of my ship's modules were crapping out.

Turns out that I accidentally turned on Silent Running by mistake lol. Silent Running basically turns everything off so that your ship and it's cargo can't be scanned, including the ship's cooling system.

I was basically sitting in a giant oven lol

I ended up with no thrusters, no warp drive, no sensors, no cargo hatch, no shields and no power distributor lmfao

Luckily the Old Bill killed my pirate for me and I realised what I'd done before my ship blew up - but it was close! Had 14% hull left before I turned it off. Luckily I had a repair module otherwise I would have had to self destruct to leave the asteroid field!

Going to change that button later lol

In VR these sort of things can be pretty unnerving 

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Grainger Games have gone bust by the looks of it.. shame because I've used them a fair bit in the past especially for preowned games.. think its ultimately inevitable for any high-street gaming retailers.. only a matter of time before GAME go bust (again).

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Game deserve to go bust. Their staff are clueless. The ironic thing is that the Game Station staff were more clued up and they all got the push after they went under. I'm pretty sure that Game staff need to FAIL a video game aptitude test before getting the job lol

Am 95% of the way through Competent for my Combat rank in Elite Dangerous now. Have been doing a SHITLOAD of bounty hunting and got over 21m credits now. Have been forced to adjust my tactics when bounty hunting now because the AI has been greatly improved. You have this thing called Flight Assist which basically smooths your ride when steering your ship so you can move around easier. With Flight Assist off if you move in a direction you'll continue to move in that direction until you apply equal force in the opposite direction. Makes it A LOT more difficult to steer but with Flight Assist off your ship turns MUCH faster. So when fighting an enemy ship you need to apply your Boost, then turn Flight Assist off and apply force in one direction until you see the enemy ship again and then turn Flight Assist on again to target the enemy.

Haven't QUITE got the hang of it but I'm getting there I think.

Next up is Expert rank, then Master, Dangerous, Deadly and finally Elite. It's supposed to be a real grind to get to Elite status but I don't mind that at all. Personally I don't think there's enough grind in the game, it's way too easy to earn credits in this version.

Going to buy an Asp Explorer next and kit it out for exploration. My Explorer rank is still Mostly Aimless. Once I've kitted that ship out it's time to go into 'the black', outside the human bubble, to discover new stars, planets, black holes and neutron stars.

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I'm trying my VERY best not to get too hyped for Skyrim VR but it's proving difficult to resist. The PSVR version is supposed to be fantastic but this is Bethesda we're talking about so it's probably going to be a mess lol

If it is any good I'll probably spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in the game

I've spent over 1200 hours in Elite Dangerous so far I think, but that's combining my flat and VR play through times. I started a new Commander when I got my Rift, having done 553 hours playing flat according to Steam. I'm not sure how long I've played using that Commander because I accidentally killed my save off. Must be 600 hours or so I reckon. And now I've done 77 hours so far with my new Commander.

I probably did 4 or 5 times that total playing the first game though. I played it religiously as a kid in the 80s and in the 90s, 00s and early 10s I used to go back and play it every few years via a Speccy emulator.

The Elite franchise is probably the best value for money I've ever had, or probably ever will have, playing video games. Especially seeing as I pirated the first game in the 80s lol

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Just seen this collection of Rick Mayall adverts that he did for Nintendo years ago. I totally missed all of them when they were on, the last two are fantastic lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w24KR30nEsg

 

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Lmfao, the Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen sub-Reddits have switched for April Fool's Day lol

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Skyrim VR is launching today. Going to wait and see how much Bethesda have fucked things up before I get it though lol