Octopus Overlords

It isn't that so much as the fact that I constantly alt-tab to check things, and regularly wander away from the PC for two minutes - or 30, unplanned until it happens.

Maybe if I had a second PC in reach, bigger blocks of time, and could talk more freely while gaming.

Some highlights from a recent GTA session.

Sniper Vs Stunters clips




A little bit of Sumo action for you.

Those were proximity mines!

And wow, that sumo map is almost as hilarious to watch as it is to play.

Blackhawk wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 2:35 pm Those were proximity mines!

Apparently so. I watched the weapon wheel selection when editing the video and was like, "Oh, yeah, totally. I thought I was picking the sticky bomb."

I also didn't post any of the "Make Every Bullet Count" videos cuz I went out like a chump pretty early in each map and it would have made for a pretty boring video.

Decided to replay Mad Max again. Third...maybe fourth time?
Anyway, here's the first 40 minutes from the game.

This first video is strictly gameplay with no commentary.
If I keep up this series, I may record commentary while playing.
For the 2 - 3 people that watch these, let me know if you prefer the commentary or just the gameplay.

From the other gameplay videos I've watched, I look at it this way:

Commentary is good, attitude is bad. When it is conversation, tips, reactions, even bits of trivia, it's great. When the commentator is try to show how trendy or edgey they are, or how big their eDick is, it is awful.

A bit of Sniper Elite earlier this afternoon. I edited out menu fiddling, long pauses, and a couple of big 'oopses' (like accidentally jumping off of a tower while trying to aim at a Nazi.)

This is me hitting the final objective of the first mission, so it has minor location spoilers, plus the locations of a few collectibles. I was taking a very high stealth (because it's that sort of game), high lethality approach (because they're Nazis, and because the cost of failure of the mission would be too high to leave sleeping people with bruised skulls all over the place.)

A little bit from Aliens: Fireteam Elite last week. We hadn't played in a while, and decided to wrap up the campaign.

And here is some Payday 2, which we're giving another whirl after a long time away.

I have somewhere between 3-400 games on Steam not counting DLCs. Can you imagine what sized hard drive I would need to have them all installed at once?

Time to answer a throwaway question seriously!

dbt1949 wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 12:00 pm I have somewhere between 3-400 games on Steam not counting DLCs. Can you imagine what sized hard drive I would need to have them all installed at once?

A ton, although if you're like me, less than you might expect. My collection, just on Steam (and a lot of OOers blow me out of the water:)



But while my collection includes some massive games with 150+GB installs, it also spans a wide range of games released over the past ~25 years, plus a lot of games that don't have a lot of fancy graphics. I'd be willing to bet that I could install a third of my entire collection on one or two thumb drives. And a lot of the ones that are left are under 10 gigabytes, which shifts the average down quite a bit. If I made a purely wild guess and set the total average of those games at 20GB, it would be about 19.5TB. There are hard drives on the market right now that could hold the whole shebang.

Now - dbt - you have:



And my impression is that you play a lot fewer bells-and-whistles AAA action titles and a lot more strategy games. That would push your average install size down considerably, but we'll stick with 20GB for convenience. 9TB. You could almost install them all on my media PC (which has an 8TB drive.) Here you go.

https://www.mysteamgauge.com/

Okay. Now tell me how long it would be to load all those games @ 750 k a second.

dbt1949 wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:08 pm Okay. Now tell me how long it would be to load all those games @ 750 k a second.

For yours? 26.667 hours.

I'm pretty sure only JetFred has more games than I do.

At this moment, 1515 games and 1065 DLCs owned. And that's just on Steam. I have stuff on GOG, Ubi, Origin, etc. And probably a couple hundred keys from Fanatical and Humble I didn't redeem (yet).

I tried using Steamgauge and it timed out on me.

EDIT: Looks like it finally loaded. Valued at 18423.34, require... 6 TB of download.

I can't get that My Steam Gauge site to load, by the way. I'll check it out later. I've actually got a collection of Steam data sits - my favorite is https://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/ Steam Library Filters. It's so, so useful for finding certain types of games in your collection (say, every WWII game you own.)

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:55 pm

dbt1949 wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:08 pm Okay. Now tell me how long it would be to load all those games @ 750 k a second.

For yours? 26.667 hours.

It took me that long almost to download Fallout 4.

Whoops, you're right. I put in the wrong letter. 135.63 days.

I've had a couple of others go up in the last few days. I've started setting them to release automatically at intervals instead of dumping them all on the same day every couple of weeks.

Just a clip of things going horribly wrong at the worst possible moment.



(Note: I think I'm done uploading full DRG gameplay levels - I've got quite a few, and they're not different enough to need a whole bunch more. I'll likely just do clips in the future.)

This is my son and I trying out Payday 2. He's on a flat screen, I'm in VR. It was mostly a chance for me to figure out the controls and see if it was halfway decent in VR, and if it worked well with mixed platforms.

It was, by the way. It isn't as... efficient as regular PC gameplay, but it does have a few perks, like being able to shoot while picking a lock.

And this time I did a whole run with the full group in VR. The next run was on Very Hard, which was too much of a jump to get used to in VR, and went very badly. VR works great with Payday 2, but it's not the best for learning new mechanics. So after that I switched back to pancake for the next run. Besides, while it was really nice to be playing while moving around instead of standing all night, we've been under a heat advisory all week, and the house is close to 80 even with the AC set to 68. I was getting a bit warm inside the headset.

Im having serious deja vu for some reason. Neat. I like it. Funny videos too. Keep'm coming. I enjoy just watching them with a buzz on. Lots of laughs. I agree Mary Ann was where its at.

Last night we tried some more World War Z. We were out of practice, the newer missions were tough to begin with, and we just weren't working well together as a team (myself included.) It went... poorly. Rather than upload all of the humiliating moments, I just decided to do a quick summary video.

I've been busy lately. Here's part one of my son and I playing some Chaos Wastes in Vermintide 2 the other night. It was my first attempt at playing a grail knight.

And another Vermintide Chaos Wastes with my son. This is the entire run this time:

So... Warhammer, Chaos Wastes. When an assassin pounces a player, it knocks other nearby players back. We'd just started this run, and it looked like a good run. And then...

I decided to make a short about... Tanks Mechanic Simulator.

Hey, been a while. Brian, Brian's wife, myself, and my son decided to give Generation Zero a go last night. It's an open world shooter with some sort of survival element (we're not that far in yet.) It's set in Sweden in the 1980s during some sort of robot invasion. It was fun, although it was a little janky and had its... quirks.

Disclaimer: Yeah, I know. Good YouTube videos are twelve seconds long, and presented in portrait format (because people don't know how a phone camera works.) I don't expect anyone to watch the whole session.

After 2 years and 39.5k views ( ), I have finally posted another video:

Beholderkin A spectator, I'd guess.

See? Someone called me pedantic. I have to prove them right.

We've been playing Void Crew lately, and I thought I'd post a couple of videos.

Void Crew is a little like Sea of Thieves in space, with each person having a distinct and specialized role (but no PvP.) You choose your ship and loadout, set up the components, upgrade them as you go, and try to achieve objectives in a series of missions. Once the enemy detects you, you have a set amount of time before an unbeatable enemy appears to wipe the floor with you. You can survive against it for a little while, but not for long, so it's best to wrap things up and be ready to jump out of the system before it appears.

As you fight, you'll find resources that you can use to upgrade your ship while on the mission (it resets between runs.)

And every once in a while you'll get interdicted while in the void (while in hyperspace/warp/etc), being pulled out and forced to fight a surprise enemy. This happened to us in the second video.

Our crew:
Brian - Gunner
VTJen (Brian's wife) - Engineer
MrMustard (Caiden, my son) - Scavenger (EVA specialist)
Me - pilot

Given that I'm the pilot, you see only my perspective on the missions. The other players would have had completely different experiences. Brian, trying to keep up with enemy targets. Jen, trying to keep the ship working. Caiden, running the out-of-ship portions of the missions and helping Brian and Jen in between.

The first video starts out with us moving components around in the ship prior to getting underway. If you don't want to see that, skip about 6 or 7 minutes in. There was an optional objective that we tackled first, but it was a low-visibility mission, and took quite a while, so it wasn't much fun to watch. I edited that bit out - you'll see us jump into the void at the start, notice a little flicker, and see us jumping to the first main mission.



This second one is a bit shorter. It starts with a minor error - Caiden scraps the wrong gun. We normally scrap the minigun that we're provided for the resources, and use the other guns instead. Caiden accidentally scrapped Brian's main gun, though, and he got stuck with the minigun. The mission still went really well. We accomplished the entire mission quickly and without much hassle.

Then we got interdicted, and things went south.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 5:44 pm Caiden accidentally scrapped Brian's main gun, though, and he got stuck with the minigun.

Then we got interdicted, and things went south.

What made it worse is that my character is specc'd out primarily for energy weapons and this left us with only ballistics which are terrible against shielded enemies.

So we struggled a bit during the interdiction.

Jen really gets in to the game...

Gross

She really, really likes resetting breakers.

I recorded these a month or so ago, and have been meaning to upload them. They're from Warhammer 40k Darktide, which is the current version of Vermintide, a wave shooter. It's some gameplay with my Veteran on Damnation (the hardest difficulty), played with random people. The Veteran build I'm using is all about taking down enemy specials (snipers, gunners, bombers, trappers, etc.) I've got some Zealot footage to upload, too, once I've figured out which video file it is.

I'm not an amazing player, but I hold my own.

Or if you want to start from episode 1...



There's also my U-boat playlist...



NFS the Run playlist...