Cheerful Ghost: An Awesome Community For Gamers

The Future of Ray Tracing and Nvidia RTX In Quake 2

Nvidia focused heavily on its new ray tracing technology during its RTX showcase. When the technology is ubiquitous enough ray tracing will allow some incredibly impressive lighting that until now was limited to show floor demos and a render farm but recently someone modified Quake 2 to support ray tracing and the results are impressive and you can try right now(assuming you have an RTX video card). Since iD Software released the source for Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Doom, Doom 2, Doom 3, etc anyone can take that source and modify it and someone did to retrofit it to support Nvidia's new RTX tech. As always, Digital Foundry has an analysis video and if you are... Read All

The Playstation Classic Is Tried In the IUPG Courtroom

I think we were all very excited about the prospect of a Nintendo Classic styled Playstation that contained the best games of that era. When Sony dropped word that one was coming and that one launch title would be Final Fantasy VII the excitement was very palpable. As someone that missed the Playstation era of gaming I was excited to get one and learn what some of the best games from that system were. That said, when the final list of titles was released it was as if the air was let out of the fan excitement balloon and when the Playstation Classic dropped it didn't land well.

I've decided to not write about the Playstation Classic launch until now because I haven't... Read All

Nintendo Announces Dr Mario World Game on Mobile

Nintendo is partnering up with mobile developer LINE to make a new entry in the Dr. Mario series for mobile called Dr. Mario World. We do know that the game will support iOS and Android and be free to play with in-app purchases. As a long-time fan of Dr. Mario this is great news and if LINE can translate the awesome puzzler elements to phones Dr. Mario World could be a perfect fit. I'm still very curious how the Mario Kart free to play smartphone game will turn out that's coming out this year and am optimistic about that but if i'm being honest, Dr. Mario seems like a better fit to me. After the amazing success of Mario Kart 8 and then 8 Deluxe on the Switch a... Read All

Travis Admin wrote on 02/01/2019 at 03:31am

I'll check out Mario Kart and Dr. Mario on mobile, but as soon as I hit a wall where I have to wait for a recharge or pay microtransactions to keep playing I'll uninstall them.

However if that's how they're planning to monetize it, if they have the opportunity to buy the game outright and skip the free-to-play trappings I'll buy it if it's fun. Super Mario Run is probably my favorite mobile game of all time, and I gladly payed $10 for it and would do the same for these if the option is there and I won't have other microtransaction blocks.

Travis Admin wrote on 02/01/2019 at 03:50am

That's pretty much my rule for any mobile game.

1. Play it
2. Have I hit any artificial progress blocks that I *must* pay microtransactions or wait to continue? If so, uninstall
3. If there are microtransaction blocks but you can pay a one time fee to move past them, is the price worth it for the fun? If not, uninstall
4. If I have gotten this far, I let the game sit for 24 hours and if I kinda don't care about playing it, I just uninstall and forget about it.

I know the gems/coins/other fake currency to get past wait timers is like the bread and butter of mobile free-to-play games but I'd take loot boxes over that predatory crap any day, and you know how I feel about loot boxes.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 02/01/2019 at 03:51am

Yeah, I do.

I think it could be a lot like Candy Crush or Bejeweled Blitz you have some kind of energy and can wait or pay to continue. It's not too bad and usually if you play it for a handful of minutes it's fine. I played a bit of Bejeweled that way and it wasn't bad at all.

Will_Ball Game Mod Super Member wrote on 02/01/2019 at 05:11pm

I am hopeful. I agree with you @Travis, Super Mario Run is one of my all time favorite mobile games. Well worth the $10.

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Cheerful Ghost Radio Episode 48 : The Glass Is Half Split

In this episode we tackle the conclusion to M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable trilogy, Glass. If you haven't seen the film yet, beware, the last half of this episode is full of spoilers, but we'll warn you about them when we're done with our monthly playing/watching segment. Spoiler alert: Mr. Glass sees dead people! David Dunn was a ghost the whole time!

The Latest Playstation Indie Bundle Is A Fun Mix of Games

The Humble Bundle has released a lot of great game bundles and the latest Playstation Indie Games bundle is a must buy if you own a PS4 and wanted a few more games to play. It's a pretty wide mix of titles such as Grim Fandango Remastered, The Bards Tale remastered, Inner Space, Broken Age, The Talos Principle, Wasteland 2, Layers of Fear, Shadow Warrior 2 and Killing Floor 2 and is $15 to get them all. $15 is a great price for just one of these games and considering some of the proceeds go to charity, even better.

The Gaming Historian Takes A Look At The Mario Land Trilogy

I've only recently discovered The Gaming Historians channel and wanted to share one of his new videos covering the Super Mario Land trilogy on Gameboy. Starting with the offbeat Super Mario Land the Mario Land trilogy is unique and nothing Nintendo has quite replicated recently. I'd love a new take on these old games with the strange mechanics and new characters as Wario was first introduced in Mario Land Six Golden Coins and later featured as the protagonist in his own game.

"The Super Mario Land series was Nintendo's attempt at bringing the Super Mario franchise to the Game Boy. But it was also the first time Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto would not be involved.... Read All

The Nintendo Wii Shop Channel Closes Next Week

https://media.nintendo.com/nintendo/bin/Ukc0nycDCrFmMwZAbz_ZJ3Um6jgORFp-/eCstgHqgT4n3siSK2-6cSoLSuYWcdSHj.jpg

If you still have Wii Shop points, spend 'em while you can. On January 30, it will no longer function.

Along with this any video-on-demand services will stop functioning on the Wii.

This brings up a topic we've discussed a lot on the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable, and now on Cheerful Ghost Radio. When will digital games be preferable to physical? For me, it's when I can have some guarantee that I can come back 20 years later and play these games.

Nintendo has gotten much better about their online services in recent years but they still aren't quite as straight-forward as their competitors were even last generation. But that said, we don't know when Sony, Microsoft, or... Read All

I'm still playing Fallout 76. Should you? Short answer: I have no idea.

Travis gives this a solid "Rad" on the Ghost Scale

This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.

Travis gives this a "Rad" on the Ghost Scale

This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.

I said in one episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio, that Fallout 76 is probably the best game I've ever played that I can't easily recommend people buy. I think that still holds true. Fallout 76 is problematic, but depending on what you're looking for there's a lot of fun there as well.

I'm not playing it nearly as much as I used to but I still pop in a few hours a week. I ran out of fresh content a long time ago. In fact that's my biggest complaint as the game stands now. Once you've launched a nuke there's not much left for you to do that you haven't done before. So you wander nuke zones and fight the scorchbeast queen to get better gear and level up to refine your... Read All I said in one episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio, that Fallout 76 is probably the best game I've ever played that I can't easily recommend people buy. I think that still holds true. Fallout 76 is problematic, but depending on what you're looking for there's a lot of fun there as well.

I'm not playing it nearly as much as I used to but I still pop in a few hours a week. I ran out of fresh content a long time ago. In fact that's my biggest complaint as the game stands now. Once you've launched a nuke there's not much left for you to do that you haven't done before. So you wander nuke zones and fight the scorchbeast queen to get better gear and level up to refine your build. That's basically what I'm doing now, in hopes of having some new content to work toward.

There are many aspects of the game that don't work, but many that do, and they work very effectively. If you're into Bethesda games for their environments, world-building, and exploration, Fallout 76 may be the best title yet for that. And when I see people say that Fallout 76 is just a quick cash grab that they clearly didn't care about making well, I can't help but think that those folks don't care about those aspects. The world is just beautifully done, and so much care has been put into the design of this massive world. The Whitespring resort is the centerpiece for this: a very faithful reproduction of the Greenbrier (you'll be coming to Whitespring a lot, because like its inspiration, The Whitespring also houses a government bunker that plays an important role in the game).

Aside from the design, I think the quests work well until they dry up. I said in my first impressions post on this game that the gameplay loop I fell into was getting quests, getting distracted from those quests by all the neat stuff you come across, make frequent trips to camp because you're carrying too much, and eventually completing quests and getting new ones. It was really satisfying. The quests themselves were essentially just vehicles to get you from point A to point B in a lot of ways; the depth previous games' quests is missing entirely from this entry due to the lack of any interactive dialogue. You'll run into robot NPCs and one friendly super mutant but while they can talk to you, you can't talk to them, so there are no narrative choices here and the quests are a bit shallow. Each quest will play out the same way every time (for the most part).

So no, this is not a typical Fallout game. How does it play as a survival game? Well, I don't know. I don't like hardcore survival games. It seems people who do *loved* Fallout 4's survival mode and dislike Fallout 76's survival aspects. I'm the opposite: Survival-lite is fine with me. Essentially what survival means in Fallout 76 is that you have to eat, drink, and watch out for diseases, and other players can come wreck your stuff. You don't lose anything meaningful when you die, just junk items (though if you've been farming for screws and you lose them all, that hurts).

Like I said before, the endgame kinda dries up. Nuke zones were supposed to be the endgame but they're ultimately a little lackluster. It seemed like we were sold on drastic changes to the environment in nuke zones, but the changes are minor. Functionally, the flora that grows in the area changes to nuked flora that you can use to make crafting materials for advanced items, and the enemies are higher level and give more loot, and you get a ton of rads that you have to manage. But aside from that it's just a yellow haze over everything. It's still fun to run in because generally about 3/4 of the 24-player servers show up to participate and wreck a bunch of glowing ghouls. It's mayhem and it's glorious, but even that can get boring if you do it enough.

Before I bought Fallout 76, other players were my biggest concern, but I have yet to meet a jerk in-game. I've read some horror stories, and it seems like as the content dries up, some high-level players get a kick out of destroying camps. The anti-griefing measures aren't up to snuff, really. Thankfully it's nearly impossible to grief with nukes (you get a 3 minute warning when a nuke is launched) and it would be a stupid waste of a nuke anyway. But the other big anti-griefing measure is bounties. If you attack a player enough without them attacking back, or if you break items at another player's camp, you get a bounty. However, all you need is a teammate to kill you. You lose your bounty, they collect some caps, and can give them right back to you. There's a minor cap loss because it isn't 1:1 for caps lost:caps gained, but caps are fairly easy to come by, so essentially there's no penalty for being a dick. There's currently no way to fully turn off PvP. A new unrestricted PvP server option is coming "soon" so hopefully they'll go there instead, but if they enjoy messing with other players it may be more fun for them to stay on the normal servers because they aren't changing how PvP works in normal servers. At least, if they are planning to, they haven't said so.

As it stands now, the game is less buggy than it ever has been but there are still some doozies. Scorchbeasts are supposed to be the big, bad, fun enemy to take down (like dragons in Skyrim) but it seems like their sonic energy wave (or whatever it is) is bugged more often than not, so whenever one sees you, your screen is just filled with blue and nothing else until you blindly run away. When they work properly, they still aren't great fun but they're manageable.

In addition, item duplication is rampant, and the most recent methods used involve doing something that tanks the server stability. Every time one is patched out, it seems like a new method is discovered. They're starting to do ban waves, but to add to the troubles this game is facing, it seems like some legit players are getting caught in that (but it's worth noting that plenty of dupers would claim to be legit, so take that with a grain of salt).

But even after the issues, I'm still going back in for more because the good stuff outweighs the bad for me. It may not do the same for you. It's hard to rate this game. I want to give it a Must Play for the fun I'm having, and Skip It because of the issues, so I think I'm going to average it out to a low Rad, but don't take that as an endorsement.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/11/2019 at 12:07am

https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/10/18219293/fallout-76-vault-63-location-inside-dlc-cut-content

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 02/11/2019 at 11:17pm

Yeah I think it's a little disingenuous for Polygon to call it content cut before launch, it seems like this stuff is their future content. There are three vaults aside from 76, and people have managed to clip into the others, but I don't think anyone had gotten into 63 yet.

While I'm here I should also comment on the fact that a patch a couple weeks back was a doozy. They managed to not notice a merge failure, so a ton of bugs from older versions cropped up and nobody caught that before the update was released. They patched up a few but I think right now it's buggier than it's been since early December.

This game is a bit of a mess. I just hope they can clean it up because I DO love it, despite its numerous flaws, some glaring.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/12/2019 at 09:01pm

> Yeah I think it's a little disingenuous for Polygon to call it content cut before launch, it seems like this stuff is their future content. There are three vaults aside from 76, and people have managed to clip into the others, but I don't think anyone had gotten into 63 yet.

I didn't read that. I agree, it's not easy to know what was planned, cut, etc. Unless they have some source saying so, it's just a guess. As an Engineer who likes releasing stuff, it's a good thing to cut scope to meet a deadline.

> They patched up a few but I think right now it's buggier than it's been since early December.

Yowza. F76 didn't land in spot where most people thought it was high quality from go so it's hard to hear they are still dealing with that sort of thing. Hopefully they can end that narrative and deliver something everyone enjoys.

> This game is a bit of a mess. I just hope they can clean it up because I DO love it, despite its numerous flaws, some glaring.

Me too.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/12/2019 at 09:02pm

My point in sharing that was really a tip that more stuff might be coming later, but it seems you know about this Vault, which makes sense.

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 02/13/2019 at 03:04am

Oh yeah definitely, I got that. I didn't think you came here to trash it, or take any stance at all really :D

But yeah they have a new, more dangerous PVP mode coming out in the spring (if it isn't delayed due to focusing on the bugs at hand... which it should be) and then they're opening the vaults as group raids.

Something *everyone* enjoys won't happen but they have a sizeable group of people who want to love it. They just have to drive it home.

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Wine 4.0 Released!

https://appdb.winehq.org/images/skyrim_specialed.jpg

Wine 4.0 was released today, bringing a ton of enhancements and bug fixes to make playing games on Linux even better. Most notably:

Vulkan support.

Direct3D 12 support.

Game controllers support.

Some of this was already possible using extra utilities to get vulkan going. DXVK would translate DirectX calls to Vulkan. But now it's native to Wine itself.

This is after months of progress in other areas of Linux gaming. Tools like Lutris have matured quite a bit, to help you get the precise Wine setup you need to run specific games, and Steam's Proton (a distribution of Wine) is getting better and better, with more successes than failures in getting Windows games running... Read All

Cheerful Ghost Branded 1UP Cards And The Portland Video Game Swap Meet 2018!

In Oregon we are all lucky to have the Portland Retro Game Expo which is a fun event in the later summer for everything awesome in retro games and trading. Cheerful Ghost has a booth each year, which is something you should check out if you haven't yet. In the new year the Video Game Swap Meet is held at the Portland Double Tree and put on by the Portland Retro Game Expo and The GameFather and I wanted to write a bit about the event and some of my pickups. Spoiler alert, Will got quite a few more games than I did.

The Portland Retro Game Expo is a very large event with a wide reach including a huge free to play arcade, game tournaments, retro game vendors, toy... Read All In Oregon we are all lucky to have the Portland Retro Game Expo which is a fun event in the later summer for everything awesome in retro games and trading. Cheerful Ghost has a booth each year, which is something you should check out if you haven't yet. In the new year the Video Game Swap Meet is held at the Portland Double Tree and put on by the Portland Retro Game Expo and The GameFather and I wanted to write a bit about the event and some of my pickups. Spoiler alert, Will got quite a few more games than I did.

The Portland Retro Game Expo is a very large event with a wide reach including a huge free to play arcade, game tournaments, retro game vendors, toy collectables, geek swag (think Yeti style shirts) and various game creators and game sites and podcasts like Cheerful Ghost. The Video Game Swap Meet is more focused around vendors selling and trading games and it's a really focused one day event. I really enjoy it because it's easy to take in and go through each booth a few times to make sure you've picked up anything you want. The swap meet had a lot of people there but less folks than PRGE which is a nice change of pace.

I wasn't coming to the Swap Meet with anything in mind to get, I really just like hanging out with the Retro community and I also wanted to handout some of our new Cheerful Ghost branded 1UP cards. If you don't know, 1UP cards are a great way to clean your old retro NES, SNES, Genesis, 64, etc carts without blowing into them. Think a simple two sided cleaning card that has no downside of spitting into your carts, which you should never do to clean them. I've seen branded 1UP cards in the wild and have wanted some Cheerful Ghost cards printed so I contacted 1UP and had some made up. If you want to see what they look like hit the image link below.

https://i.imgur.com/qIN8dfv.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/UGtTWN3.jpg

Will and I were one of the first people in line and as such I was able to hand out the cards, some stickers and a podcast handout to the first 10 or so people easily. People seemed to dig the new 1UP cards so I'm going to do a similar giveaway at Portland Retro Game Expo this year as well as sell them at our booth. I'd like to get some Cheerful Ghost shirts printed this year too, but we'll see how it goes.

As to the stuff I picked up this year I finally was able to round out my collection of Just Dance games on the Wii with the original Just Dance 2009 game. I've got the others and it's a fun series and one reason I still have my Wii hooked up to my TV. I also picked up two DS games in Plants VS Zombies and Zoo Tycoon. Both are PC ports that landed in various forms and I've only played a bit of Plants VS Zombies DS so far. I want to do a more formal review of Plants VS Zombies DS but i'd say if you were a fan of the game and wanted to collect a version of it on DS, get it. I aim to collect all the Zelda games and finally added Oracle of Ages and Seasons on Gameboy Color to my collection after finding them both for a good price. I also saw Link to the Past in box and in great shape but I think i'm going to save that pickup for this years Portland Retro Game Expo.