It's CoD Ghosts Double XP weekend. Right now. And I'm not playing. I've warmed up to the game a little more, simply because I fucking love having a guard dog and a little vulture drone following me in multiplayer, but if it wasn't for Claire and our friend playing it, as well as the insane amount of money I have spent on those hardened editions, I would have uninstalled this stupid game a day or two after release.
This game sports some of the biggest maps I have ever seen in any CoD, some of them three times as big as any map on Black Ops 2. How they still can't implement a proper spawning system is entirely beyond me. You spawn, you get shot in the back the same second. And it happens a lot. You'd think that on a map, which is the size of a small continent, the game would find a safe spot for you to appear after death, which doesn't immediately put you into the crosshairs of an enemy player. Being 64bit only, Ghosts is also incompatible with VAC and the paranoia regarding hacks and cheats is growing every day. And rightfully so, if you're looking at what's currently going on over at Youtube.
I've been experimenting with Nvidia's ShadowPlay some more and for the most part, I like it better than Fraps. There is no huge performance hit when recording in full 1080p, which is a huge advantage over Fraps, Playclaw and the like. Unlike these programs, ShadowPlay also records in 2-4k ultraHD, which I like. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the recording options, though. Shadowplay automatically encodes footage in .H264 and reduces the output quality a little too much in my opinion. And it records everything in the exact same frame rate it plays, resulting in 60fps video material, which is nice, but utterly useless for Youtube. It also results in larger file sizes than necessary. Still, it's a very early version, it's all still in its testing stages and it's already shaping up to become a new favourite.
I've recorded some STO gameplay in UltraHD and am putting it on my Youtube channel right now. Again, the final result doesn't look any better or different than stuff recorded with Fraps, what with Youtube's awful compression methods and everything, but the whole thing is smoother, less choppy and more enjoyable to watch. I've recorded a Starbase 24 Scenario with dozens upon dozens of ships, so there's still some stuttering going on, but that's due to the crappy game engine and happens anyway, recording or not.
I'm also taking care of gaming-related weekend news, which is a bit of a pointless job right now. All the important people are covering Blizzcon and that's exactly what all the news is about. People wanna know about Draenor, the angel of death and the heroes of the storm and with all of that being covered by other writers, I'm kinda just sitting here looking for scraps. Oh hey, new update for Allods Online. Whee! :P
Warlords of Draenor looks awesome. Looking at my newsfeed I get this huge wave of negativity from people complaining about how it's just "filler" content and too horde-centric and not enough Burning Legion and all kinds of shit like that. I wouldn't go back to WoW if I got paid to do it (and in my line of work, that's an actual possibility), but even then, this thing looks like the most exciting expansion since Burning Crusade to me. There's also the usual amount of people on Facebook proclaiming the "death" of WoW. Yeeeah... wouldn't bet any money on that one.
With Hugo being tame enough for hand-feeding, I'm spending a lot more time around his tank. He tends to knock around his decoration a bit and his water bowl gets dirty all the time, but we used to wait for him to fall asleep before fixing any of these problems, because he gets a little too... attached to human hands when they get too close to his vivarium. But I think he has reached the point where he can tell fingers from mice, chicken and bacon, so you can actually reach right in there, rearrange his stuff, give him fresh water and all that. I come over there every night with a piece of chicken.
He's getting incredibly huge and heavy. He's by no means overweight - we're taking absolute care of that. He's just massive in size. It's really fun. Little dinosaur getting up on his tail and hind legs to say hello. Makes me wanna pick him up and hug him. He's not a huge fan of that, but he puts up with it. Most of the time. :P
-Cat
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