Mirado

I don't think I'm really "proud" to own any games that I have. There's a bunch that are bad that I've kept because I get some joy out of them, and there's a few I would never sell because of how much fun I've had with them, but I can't come up with a game that I'm actually proud to have owned.

I've got a tiny figure of Mecha Zangief that's signed by Yoshinori Ono, which is kinda cool.

This is exactly what I did. I took a look at the assets they had in their pitch, and the technical details they were sharing at the time, and I immediately thought "This is Crysis but five times as bad. We won't have the tech to run this thing properly for years." The scope of the thing, the polygon counts they wanted to push, all the features that they wanted to add...it was never going to be possible in 2014. Hell, it might not be possible in 2017. Just look at the face tech:

Now imagine that level of fidelity across all characters in a setting which is also calculating ship velocities and handling AI routines and so on and so on. I'm not sure if they're aiming for this level of fidelity in the multiplayer component, but if they are, it's twice as nuts. If they actually plan on delivering what they are promising here, it'd be insane. Can they do it? Time will tell, but I never believed they had a chance of pulling this off back in 2014. They shouldn't have even said that they were trying to hit a ridiculous date like that.

I give the SC devs credit for the amount of communication they've had with the community; weekly videos, tons of posts on their website, and so on. It's the main reason why, even after they've overshot their target goal by years (although I backed the game knowing full well that they'd never hit their release date, so perhaps that keeps my outrage to a minimum), I still am hopeful that things are going alright. Maybe not as intended and certainly not difficulty free (as the above article demonstrates), but alright.

Full disclosure: I bought a video game space ship. Not a crazy one, but I wanted to see the early alpha stuff as it rolled out so I bought a package that included both that and a video game space ship. No, the alpha access hasn't been worth it; too early, too unoptimized, too feature bare (yeah, exactly what you'd expect from an alpha, so I only have myself to blame). I am still interested in playing SC and think it can (not will) be a good game at the end of it all, and I am not ready to call it a failure until it actually fails.

He's spiritually wealthy, that's for sure. Drew's got a Fort Knox level of zen going on.

@zombiepie: At risk of sounding like that old "Games were better in my day!" guy, all of the post FFVI games that I've played have their own brand of madness, endings included. Even when they don't, and it seems like they were able to avoid writing themselves into a corner to the point that they have to throw the entire box of jumbled plots and explanations into the air and hope it lands somewhat cohesively, they put out sequels that proceed to fuck up whatever they avoided fucking up in the first place.

Hell, that could be true of most pre-FFVI games as well. I've only played I, V, and VI, so who knows, the rest could all have batshit insane endings.

And you should absolutely do Grandia II. Not only is it a hell of a lot more fun to play, but the story and characters are pretty bananas. If you decide to slog through X at some point, make sure to get your hands on the remastered version, as the stuff they added is hella dumb and needs to be addressed.

It's all hot bullshit. Or, at the very least, I've never seen any hard data telling me otherwise. A good mid-tier board will last you more years than you'd care to keep it, and outside of a few nice but not critical extras (and the obvious caveat about the voltage regulation/overclocking potential, but that's such a small subset of the market that those people hardly need my help in choosing hardware), I've always shaken my head when people spend huge amounts on the motherboard, especially when they may have a substandard PSU. I mean, given unlimited money, I'd go nuts. I'd eat a Maximus VII Sabercat Ultra Tough Edition ROG Black right up. No reason not to do it. But without unlimited funds, I'm going to take the $50 or $100 or $200 I could blow on a board that no one can really tell me what I'm getting out of it, and get a better GPU, or a bigger SSD, or even faster RAM.

Let me go back to my example of the craziest Z170 board out there, in the closing of this review from Tweaktown:

I want to take a second and discuss the value of this $500 Z170 motherboard. It's no secret that differentiation is hard to provide and even harder to communicate with the Z170 chipset. Since so many features are provided through the PCH and CPU clocks are roughly the same among boards, many users are just fine with a sub $200 motherboard. The truth is that these higher priced boards might cost a premium, but there are features that add to their cost.

It then goes on to talk about overclocking related features, a built-in wireless card, and a Thunderbolt port. That's it. That's what the most extreme of the extreme can get you, so how little must the sub $300 offerings have to differentiate themselves? Hell, that crazy board can't even do 3/4 way SLI! (In fact, none of them can, unless they have an add-on PLX chip.)

So, it may be a case of the normal offerings being good enough, and the crazier offerings being a bit better, that causes the reviews to endorse what they do. There's nothing wrong with those more expensive boards, after all. Or, it could be more nefarious; the people usually interested in this stuff would be the ones visiting these sites, so the reviews reading like marketing pitches may be a bit intentional. I can't say, all I know is that in recent years, your choice of motherboard really has never mattered less when you enter the murky middle of the product line. As long as the board you receive is working the way it should, you'll hopefully never know that it's there, and it'll perform to a roughly equivalent degree both in terms of operation and longevity as something more expensive.

You're a well informed duder. You probably know more than I do given what I've read, or at the very least you're more informed about the (lack of) differences between your choices. Don't fret over it; trust that if you can't see a striking, glaring difference, that there isn't one. Your part selection looks excellent to me. With the addition of your storage drives and your GPU of choice, you'll have a killer system.

Brett's the only anime editor we need.

Who else has credentials like this?

@jasoncooke: Yeah, I agree that DDR4-3000 seems to be a good sweet spot, unless you are spending a ton and the extra $100 or whatever from doubling the RAM cost only constitutes a small part of your overall budget.

You could just rephrase that as "Would you like to see Jason in more content?" and my answer would still be yes.

@jasoncooke said:

@mister_avatar: I think your build looks good but two things:

• 32GB is a lot of RAM, unless you are doing serious crunching and multitasking (I'm guessing not with a stock i5) you would be better off with faster DDR4 (2666 is a good balance) and 16GB, I doubt you will ever see a benefit of having 32GB and you can always add more later. Going faster than 2133 does improve framerates (varies on game) and system wide performance (bigger impact)
• It looks like you are going for a white build, so I would recommend Corsair Vengeance LED, I have a set of 16GB with white lights (they slowly fade in & out) , it's a nice addition

Take a look at how RAM speed affects certain games with an i3

Unless I'm missing something, that chart does a poor job of illustrating the performance difference between RAM speeds; only two speeds are tested (2666 and 2133Mhz), and they didn't test the 2133Mhz sticks with either the i5 or the i7. It'd be better if they ran it with four RAM speeds all on a single processor to eliminate that variable. In the end, it doesn't really matter as the price difference between DDR4 RAM speeds is very minor, so you might as well go with the quickest sticks that aren't ridiculously priced.

EDIT: Oh, you kind of pointed that out, sorry. Anyway, here's the tests with an i7 across a wide variety of speeds; you'll notice that while there is some improvements, only Fallout 4 really gains a bunch from faster RAM. There's nothing wrong with buying the quicker sticks, as long as you aren't spending double on them.