Cheerful Ghost: An Awesome Community For Gamers

Minecraft To Get Ray Tracing

It looks like Ray Tracing is coming to Minecraft. According to an article (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/render-dragon-and-nvidia-ray-tracing), Ray Tracing will come to Minecraft next year. The video trailer says "Windows 10," so I'm not sure whether or not that means it's coming to the Java Edition or just the Windows 10 Bedrock Edition. Check out the embedded video. It looks beautiful!

This actually makes me regret that I did not recently buy an RTX GPU. Part of that decision was because not a lot of games feature Ray Tracing yet, so it didn't seem like a technology I really cared about at the time. That part of the decision still holds true, although this... Read All

Will_Ball Game Mod Super Member wrote on 08/19/2019 at 10:38pm

My laptop has an RTX in it. Not sure what frame rate I will get with this, but if it comes in the java version, I will give it a go.

Azurephile Super Member Post Author wrote on 08/19/2019 at 10:44pm

I'm jealous! I imagine since you have an RTX GPU, you'll probably get a decent fps. I managed to get a lot of fps for the Quake 2 RTX version, especially when I was in a dark place and also when I played it on lower settings. I don't have an RTX GPU, I have a GTX 1660Ti.

Azurephile Super Member Post Author wrote on 04/17/2020 at 09:13pm

Fair warning: The Minecraft RTX beta is out, but unless you have an RTX 2060 or above, don't bother wasting your time. If you do not meet this minimum system requirement, the game will not allow you to enable the related features. This is a departure from the Quake 2 RTX version, where it required a RTX 2060 or better, but you could still run it, even if your FPS was horrible.

Will_Ball Game Mod Super Member wrote on 04/23/2020 at 04:53pm

I tried a little bit of this the other day and thought it looked ok. I need to dig into it a little more.

Azurephile Super Member Post Author wrote on 04/23/2020 at 06:43pm

I watched a benchmark video, you (or anyone else) can check it out here if you want: https://youtu.be/LWBnLPlxVhg

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Atlas Single Player Mode

I was an early adopter of Atlas. I can attest to it’s less than perfect launch. In fact, I had a terrible time with it. I joined an official server, but couldn’t hardly get any frames per second. It turned out that there were very many players in the world, but most of them were sleeping (they were offline). This caused serious issues which was later resolved.

I didn’t play the game for too long. I enjoyed the beginning of it, starting out, collecting resources to make my first set of cloth armor and tools. Then I had to collect resources so I could build a raft and set out to sea, I had to make sure I had enough resources, including food, for my travel. What makes... Read All

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust Is Out Now!

I've been eagerly anticipating the launch of Anodyne 2 as I adored the original game. Anodyne 2 is out now and is getting very solid reviews. Anodyne 2 mixes up the early Playstation / N64 era graphics with the 2D sprite feel of the original Anodyne for a very original take on the genre. That said, with development going strong on Tale of the White Wyvern when am I going to have time to play this? Realistically not for quite some time, but if anyone does play this let me know what you think. You know... vicarious living... it's a thing when you're busy.

"Nano Dust infects the islanders of New Theland, distorting their emotions and desires. You play as Nova, a Nano... Read All

The Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels Boardgame is on Kickstarter!

Back this on Kickstarter!

Shovel Knight is a Cheerful Ghost fan favorite indie game that keeps getting better with each update. The final King of Cards update is coming and before that ... the Shovel Knight board game? Looks like Yacht Club is partnering with Panda Cult Games to release an all new Shovel Knight board game that is heavily inspired by the video game. There are two Kickstarter funding options at $40 for the game with cardboard stand-ups and the $70 version with the full 3D plastic figure prints. What's included in box is pretty impressive at both price points and there is a cool stretch goal at 80k to have the bosses be playable characters. The game is on the way to get funded... Read All

No Man’s Sky: Beyond Out Now!

No Man’s Sky: Beyond is rolling out now, and this is the biggest update yet. It seems as though every system in the game has been improved upon, on top of the new additions it adds.

I won’t go into all of them here, because there are so many. But here are the highlights.

Expanded multiplayer, allowing up to 8 players per session on console, and 32 players on PC.

VR support, for various PC VR systems and PSVR. And you can use standard controls or motion controls.

Heavy optimization, including switching to Vulkan rendering on PC. This one is huge for older PCs and AMD cards, and Vulkan has many other benefits for optimization across the board.

New story elements... Read All

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 08/14/2019 at 06:15pm

I was thinking about writing about this when I saw it a while ago. I thought about asking if you were going to do that. Again, I think you do a better job. Your bullet points make the post look good. Maybe I should take some inspiration, or maybe I shouldn't be a copy cat.

Are you going to play this again? I'm not sure, myself. I don't actually have it installed on my SSD yet, so I'd pretty much have to redownload it (I don't want to run my games off of the HDD).

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/14/2019 at 07:25pm

FYI you can keep games downloaded and move them between your HDD and SSD. But I don’t think you’d run into much of a hitch running this one from the HDD. It’s the same few textures just arranged in interesting ways programmatically so there’s less taxing on the hard drive and more on the CPU to build the world.

I have tried it on both and it only improves loading by a couple seconds so I let it live on the HDD.

But yeah I’m going to try some of the new things out. Not sure if I’ll make a new game or not. Depending on how good the VR is (and how sick it makes me) I may finally properly play my PS4 copy.

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/14/2019 at 07:27pm

https://www.howtogeek.com/269515/how-to-move-a-steam-game-to-another-drive-without-re-downloading-it/

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 08/14/2019 at 09:40pm

I kept many of my installed games where they were on the HDD. I copied some over, that I wanted installed on the SSD. Unfortunately, Steam still re-downloaded the games that I moved over. It's ok though. Yeah, I know how to run games from a second folder.

You have VR? I'd be interested in how that works, looks, or plays. I have VR ready hardware, except for the headset. I'm not sure when I might get into VR, but it's not really a priority for me right. I'm still waiting for reality to bring us the Holodeck from Star Trek. I think that could be the end of society as we know it though. LOL

Do you think you'll write more about this update after playing it some? I pretty much always start a new game, I've never made it to the center. I'm not sure whether or not I want to jump back in the game right now. I did watch a video of Sean Murray talk about this update and how it basically includes three main features. He was smiling the whole time he talked about it, which I thought was cool. Here's a link to that: https://youtu.be/zAo7b4HjtjQ

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/14/2019 at 09:51pm

That's weird, it should just move it right over. Oh well. I guess you could do the manual...

1. Rename the folder
2. Tell steam to uninstall it
3. Tell Steam to install it
4. Stop the install
5. Move that folder to the new location
6. Start the install

It should just reverify if you do that, I did that a few times before they implemented the ability to change it.

And yeah PSVR is pretty neat. Very cheap way to get into VR. It's not as good as the Vive I wouldn't imagine but it's great for what it is.

I may or may not write more, kinda depends on how neat it is.

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 08/14/2019 at 11:14pm

When I installed the SSD, I put Windows on it and made it my primary drive. I want the SSD to contain my regularly used files (like games and apps), and the HDD to be my back up or storage space (for other files like docs and stuff). I created a fresh install of Windows on the SSD and so I had to install everything else fresh as well. So, Steam did not see that any games were installed (because they weren't). I tried copying game directories from the HDD to the SSD. It seemed like Steam was verifying the files, but still downloaded them anyway. I'm really not even sure that I'm noticing a difference in game load times with the SSD. The SSD definitely makes Windows boot incredibly faster. Maybe I did something wrong with how I tried to install games to the SSD and maybe I'll pay more attention to that in the future. The SSD is a bit limited, so I don't really want to install a bunch of stuff on it. I'd still like to install games on it just to see if there's any performance/loading differences. Thanks for the input, I appreciate it. :)

Back to NMS, I'm just not sure I feel like jumping in it again. I feel like I've been through the beginning quite a few times and don't necessarily want to repeat it, although I always want to start out fresh with a new update. Perhaps with this new update I'll enjoy it more. The last time I played, I got stuck on a mission and pretty much gave up.

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/15/2019 at 03:14am

Oh! That makes more sense now. Yeah some games will have a big difference, some not so much. Fallout 76 seemed to load about 10 seconds faster on SSD.

And yeah, that’s kinda why I haven’t started over with each update, I’ve already put so much into it.

AdamPFarnsworth wrote on 08/15/2019 at 02:27pm

I wish my computer could handle the game! I bought it launch day and dealt with *all* the issues/bugs/crashes, and still thought it was pretty incredible. But it was missing so much that I expected it to have. Watching all these updates the past few years has made me super jealous!

...this is one of those games that the potential sucks me in so much, I might be willing to buy a PS4 and PSVR. (Although it likely would turn into yet another system that just sits there like both my Classics and Wii U lol)

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/15/2019 at 03:17pm

Yeah Adam, I think they’ve gone well past what most expected it to have.

Timogorgon Member wrote on 08/16/2019 at 06:20am

Going to be putting my PSVR to use tomorrow night on this. I'll be sure to report back on how it goes. :)

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 08/21/2019 at 06:29am

After 355 hours and almost a year after having played it, today I learned something about NMS. You can claim abandoned ships and keep your current ship! I saw this done by one of my favorite YouTubers, Paul Soares Jr.. I did a little Googling and it seems that there's a bug with this in that you have to put the inventory from your old ship into the new one and then you can claim the new one, for free, actually, I think. I don't know if that "bug" still exists, but it wasn't too long ago that people wrote about it. Do any of you have any experience with this?

Ok, so I tried it out, things are different. Why did it have to spawn me at a toxic and then a boiling planet? Uh. Yeah I started a new game three times. I don't intend to make note of all the changes I noticed here. I did get my star ship repaired, but I haven't taken off yet. One thing I do want to point out though is the GeForce Experience settings. They were telling me the game was already using optimal settings. I looked at the graphic/video options in game and the preset was on "Enhanced." I switched it to "Ultra" to see if I'd notice any difference, which I didn't. Travis did tell me once that you can't always trust the settings in GE. I think this may perhaps be due to a change in the game's settings and maybe GE didn't get updated. At least, that's what I think. I think the settings are different, but I could be wrong. What preset are you running with? Do you notice anything different between presets? If, so, what?

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 08/22/2019 at 02:23pm

I never run with any preset, I fine tune it all, but I’ve got basically everything maxed with motion blur, chromatic aberration, and scanlines turned off so I don’t get motion sickness.

And yeah you can claim those found ships for free, since you’re finding them randomly there’s nobody to pay (though I think they added NPCs to some of these)

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 10/07/2019 at 09:52am

After reinstalling Windows again, I found out how to successfully move your games from the old Steam directory to the new directory without having to reinstall or redownload them. Since I wasn't doing a fully clean install, Windows created a Windows.old folder, which contained Steam in Program Files (x86). This is easy! Install Steam and then exit it. This creates a new Steam folder. Then copy (or move) all of the contents of the old Steam folder into the new one, open Steam, and everything's there! :) So, I just copied from C:\Windows.old\Program Files (x86)\Steam\ to C:\Windows\Program Files (x86)\Steam\. I tried to copy them over with Steam and Steam wasn't having it. Before, I had copied the individual game folders over and Steam still had to redownload and install them. This "new-to-me" method I discovered mostly on my own worked perfectly! I just thought I'd necro this a bit and add it here just FYI, in case some one here needs to use it.

jdodson Admin wrote on 10/07/2019 at 02:17pm

I've been installing my games to an attached (on Windows) USB drive. This means game boots are slower but once i'm in things are fast. One upside is I don't have to reinstall everything when I reinstall or do something to Windows or move my games to a new PC.

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LGR Reviews Empire Earth: 500,000 Years of Real-Time Strategy

LGR is one of the many YouTubers I subscribe to that makes a fun mix of old hardware review videos and video game reviews. It's become one of the coolest channels I watch and I don't share a lot of it because it's not all video game related. That said, I think i'm going to start sharing more of them as Cheerful Ghost is a pretty retro friendly community and I think we all love looking back on crazy old hardware like Zip-drives and Tandy computers.

In one of LGR's more recent reviews he takes a peek back at Empire Earth, a classic RTS game that feels at home with Age of Empires and Rise of Nations.

"Review and retrospective on the RTS game Empire Earth from 2001! Half a... Read All

ArK Genesis Announced!

Last year, Studio Wildcard (SW) received major backlash after posting a countdown on the Ark website (survivetheark.com), which ended up being an event that had dino skins (based on the new Jurassic World movie at the time) as rewards. Many fans, including myself, were expecting news of a new DLC, we were sure of it, but we were wrong. However, not much later, SW posted another countdown on the website, but this ended up being an announcement of a DLC, Extinction.

I’m not going to spoil the lore of Ark here. If you want to know it, you can find it easily enough on the Internet. However, it seemed Extinction would be the end of Ark, or Ark DLC. There was a subtle piece... Read All Last year, Studio Wildcard (SW) received major backlash after posting a countdown on the Ark website (survivetheark.com), which ended up being an event that had dino skins (based on the new Jurassic World movie at the time) as rewards. Many fans, including myself, were expecting news of a new DLC, we were sure of it, but we were wrong. However, not much later, SW posted another countdown on the website, but this ended up being an announcement of a DLC, Extinction.

I’m not going to spoil the lore of Ark here. If you want to know it, you can find it easily enough on the Internet. However, it seemed Extinction would be the end of Ark, or Ark DLC. There was a subtle piece at the end that hinted there could be more. There were also coded messages, which revealed another location in the Ark lore. This lead many to believe that this was not the end of Ark, as the story was still open-ended.

Recently, SW, posted a new countdown on their website. There were coded messages found on a website, which were decoded and showed SW giving us hints of something that’s coming. The way they did this was interesting and it was also very interesting to see people on the Internet who were able to decode these messages. One of the encoded messages stated, “this is not Ark 2.” People also were able to analyze the webpage code or scipt in Firefox and found a directory leading to a sound file. The directory was called “Genesis.”

It was a day before the end of the countdown and the Playstation store had a new post. It was showing a Genesis Season Pass along with some pictures of the new content. It seemed someone might be ready to lose their job after this leak. However, it turned out to be true. It wasn’t really a leak though. The page was supposed to go up yesterday on 8/8/19. However when for us it was 8/7/19, it was already 8/8/19 in Australia. SW pretty much just laughed about it in their announcement stream.

Genesis is “a new chapter” in Ark. You can see and hear in the announcement video that we are going some where where some one cannot help us, so she creates a cool robot-like thing and gives it her personality. This will make more sense if you’ve followed the lore of Ark, you’ll know who that “someone” is. This robot is called HLN-A (hint here). It’s designed to go along with us on this new journey and help us along the way. It can show us when there’s danger, react to our emotes, and encourages us to do things in the game. It seems it will guide us on our way to the end of the game or content. Surprisingly, this HLN-A is available now if you purchase the Genesis Season Pass (as I did). Right now, it’s pretty much a cosmetic “pet.” It’s expected to become much more of something when the content is released.

We got a look at some pictures, which show off new creatures and new biomes. Two pictures seem to clearly be on the first map, called the Island (in case you didn’t know), but SW says this new content will consist of two new maps. There’s a volcanic biome, ocean biome, and poisonous-looking biome. Part 1 of Genesis will arrive in December, while Part 2 will arrive in “winter 2020.” I assume they mean Part 2 will arrive about a year after Part 1, because SW always released new DLC a year after the previous one. So, this year, just like last year, many of us are back on the Ark hype train.

One of the new creatures was seen near an active volcano and it’s covered in molten rock/fire. This creature doesn’t like water, can be tamed, and acts as a mobile forge (for smelting iron). This is similar to how other creatures work in the game, for example the Giant Beaver acts as a mobile Smithy. Another new small four-armed creature looks adorable, but is Ark’s first shape-shifter. If it eats Element it turns into a larger wolf-like creature. It seems as though it will not turn on whoever it tamed, but can be used in some strategic ways.

Apparently, (as revealed by SW), people have been asking for another creature from the devs for quite a while now. SW stated that they just didn’t have anywhere to put it. This is the new giant turtle looking creature. It functions as a mobile island, you can build your base on it, and harvest the plants/materials that grow on it. It can dive underwater and when it does, it creates an oxygen bubble, so you won’t need to wear SCUBA gear. This creature is massive and as such Genesis will have an ocean biome that this giant can live in, where it can be tamed.

There are a couple more things mentioned by SW, but I recommend (if you’re interested) to watch the stream, which has been posted on YouTube (https://youtu.be/zC7ArMfwz8U).

Last year, I was really excited for Extinction, but was a bit disappointed by it, mostly because of the amount of things that feel nearly impossible to do alone in single player mode. I don’t want to be let down again, but I can’t help but to get excited about Genesis. However, it does make me wish that devs wouldn’t tell us long in advance about something they’re working on and make us wait months or years at a time. Instead, I kind of wish they would just make the announcement when they release the content. The days do seem to pass more slowly when you’re eagerly awaiting something new to be released.

So, what do you think about this? Are you excited? Have you purchased the Season Pass for this? It’s only about $35 and seems like a great value for Ark content released in two parts. Let me know what you think.

Digital Foundry Reviews The Newly Released Classic Doom Collection Ports

A few days ago I wrote about iD Software releasing the original Doom, Doom 2 and Doom 3 on mobile, Switch, XBox 360 and Playstation 4 during this years Quakecon. Some of the games launched with a few issues that Bethesda has fixed(like requiring you to create a Bethesda.net account) but how do these ports run on modern systems and stack up to the originals? Digital Foundry are some of the best reviewers around and run all the new ports through the paces in this video that's a must watch if you are considering playing these classic games again.

Kung-Fu Heroes & Vice: Project Doom Coming to Nintendo Online August 21st!

Nintendo is adding two new classic NES titles to it's Nintendo Online service this month called Kung-Fu Heroes & Vice: Project Doom. These are really unique games to add to the service as they are not top tier NES games but help fill in the Nintendo Online collection to be more than just a library of greatest hits. I'm excited to get these added to the service because as someone that hasn't played either, this seems like a great way to jump in.

DuckTales: Remastered Leaving All Digital Storefronts This Week

If you've been putting off buying DuckTales: Remastered, it's time to make a decision. Unfortunately, it will be leaving digital storefronts in a few days. Steam and Xbox will lose the game August 8th at 8PM EST, and the Wii U shop and Playstation 3 will lose it on the 9th at 8PM EST.

Bonus, it's getting a 75% off sale most places as a farewell sale. For under 4 bucks, this is a steal.

It saddens me that this game is leaving. There's no reason stated, but it's likely licensing issues with Disney. That's a common thing with licensed games. If you want to read more about my thoughts on this game, I covered those here... six years ago. Wow, it's been that long!
... Read All