Topic: PC Gaming

theres a tomb raider game free on steam till 24/march...

two!
Tomb raider
and
Lara Croft - Temple of Osiris (I think)

@6ch6ris6 it needs DLC !

whats the difference between a free game and free to play game on steam ?

A free game is regular game that has been discounted at 100% off.

A Free-to-play game is microtransaction hell.

@CanisWolfred how much money is a microtransaction hell ? a serious question...

Microtransactions are a form of recurrant monitezation, so...all of your money, potentially, if you're not careful and fall for a myriad of tactics that many F2P games employ, even the "good" ones that aren't as obvious and agressive about it. Ultimately, they're designed to encourage the player to spend money, and most of those games probably would have (and certain cases, used to have) a subscription service, but that model ultimately proved to be less profitable than most F2P models, because there's no limit on how much the user could spend (unless you live in a country that enforces a spending limit on games).

I'm just saying, Free-to-play games are only "free" for no other reason than to cast the widest net possible as its creator hunts for the next big fish. Buyer beware.

Does anyone know a good game on steam for a fiver?

@Ninfan Not sure if you're able to redeem this in Ireland, but Yakuza 0 is a fantastic game and that's currently £3.74 on Humble Store: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/yakuza-0

I don't have a VR set, and probably won't get one anytime soon, so I watched the ending for Half-life Alyx on youtube.

I won't say too much to avoid spoilers, but lets just say it heavily suggests they're working on Half-life 3 (or Episode 3) next. Thank god for that!

Any tips for recording footage from PC games?

I've tried Windows 10 Game Bar, OBS, and Elgato to varying degrees of success. Essentially I manage to get snippets of good footage, but for all of these performance takes a noticeable hit after 20 mins or so of gameplay - with video beginning to stutter and/or music beginning to glitch out.

Unfortunately I only have the one PC so cannot capture from a second PC.

@Link-Hero Thanks for the suggestion. I've actually tried my Elgato (HD60 S+) capture device, but as I'm using it to record on the same PC I assume it's adding a fair amount of processing in the background.

So far I'd say the best option seems to be the Windows 10 Game Bar.

Strangely recording seems fine for the first 20 or so mins. Could it be that some other background processes are popping up and slowing things down as my gameplay progresses?

@Cotillion

Yeah and they WERE working on a sequel at that time. It just ended getting scrapped.

The ending to Alyx is a bit more revealing though, because it's something they really didn't need to do, unless they were planning on a sequel to Episode 2.

@Buizel

OBS is the best software based screen recorder I've used. Seems to have a very limited impact on performance. You do need to play with all the settings though!

how much ram should I really have, to play a good pc game?

@Ninfan

Depends on the game. Probably an absolute minimum of 4GB for anything graphically advanced.

4GB are not enough today. 8GB is minimum. even better 16GB, but only if there is cash left

@Dezzy can I add some GB to my hard drive. And where would I get it.

What are you on about, @Ninfan .... ? It's not your hard-drive! If you don't know enough about it, you shouldn't do it yourself

@BruceCM I don't mean that I'll do it myself. I ment where will I get somewhere to add it to my hard drive.

@Ninfan

Hard drive isn't RAM. That's a different thing entirely. The RAM attaches to the computer's Motherboard. If you want to install more, you need to look up the details for your motherboard to see what types of RAM it's compatible with. Then you need to check that there's a spare socket so you can add more.