Video Games Update

Wed, 28 May 2025 13:42:16 GMT

Just a brief overview of what I'm doing to waste time these days!

I'm still playing Fallout 76 regularly on the PS5, doing the daily and weekly rewards. I'm not exactly an "end game" build, because I CBA to do the homework into the right weapon mods and perk cards and whatnot, but I'm having fun.
My current "plot game" is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Fallen Order. It's pretty good fun, about the right kind of difficulty for me - challenging enough to be interesting but not hard enough to be off-putting.
One of this month's freebies on PlayStation Network is Ark: Survival Ascended, the next-gen remake of Survival Evolved. This is a survival, crafting game with dinosaurs and sci-fi stuff side by side. It's insanely popular and I've played it a lot mostly trying to figure out why... I just don't get it, but it's annoyingly moreish.
Over on the desktop, I'm playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker. This is a moderately chill game where you're literally spending time taking apart used spaceships. There is some threat and danger, such as active electrical systems or combustible components, and there's an ongoing narrative plot against a backdrop of indentured servitude and capitalism gone mad. Most usefully, each game shift lasts 15 minutes so it's relatively easy not to get caught up in it.
Also on the desktop I recently acquired Rail Route, where you get to play a train dispatcher at a busy Eastern European station and have to try and schedule services to maximise throughput and minimise delays. It's horribly addictive.

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Tech Meanderings: New Gaming Machine, New House Server?

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 22:45:28 GMT

Now we've had a smart meter fitted, I've started to want to put together some kind of in-home monitoring of energy usage, temperature etc. with the intention that eventually I could start doing things like smart radiator control and so on. Obviously this will need a computer that's on 24/7 to look after things. The only computer in the house that fits that description is my fileserver - it's an old HP Microserver with a 4TB RAID where I keep backups and other files. It's been struggling for a while just running a few services such as the Unifi wireless controller, so it's clear it wasn't going to cut it for anything more.

( nerdy stuff )

This means that I'm now able to take full advantage of the AMD RX 6650XT graphic card which cosmolinguist bought for me. I'm enjoying the dappled sunlight through the swaying branches in 7 Days to Die and I'm struggling to get it to drop below 60fps, the maximum my monitor will support. Not only that, but I'm now in a Steam "Family" with gamer stepson L, so I have access to his vast library of games. This means that I've dipped my toes into Helldivers 2, a co-op shooty game which is basically Starship Troopers with the serial numbers filed off. Some of the local Discord people play it and I've joined in a co-op session with them now. Even though it's a Windows game running through Proton (formerly WINE), I'm still getting that maximum 60fps with lovely quality graphics (by my relatively low standards).

All this gaming has rather distracted me from the original purpose of this hardware - I need to transplant the hard drive from my old desktop into my new workstation when the NVMe adapter arrives, then transplant the hard drives from my fileserver into my old desktop and use it as the always-on system that'll monitor the house. So maybe that's a project for the coming weekend...

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You Don't Live Like I Do

Video Games Update

Tech Meanderings: New Gaming Machine, New House Server?