Quantum Break – You Got Time?

Decided to replay one of my favorite, semi-recent AAA-gaming releases – because the last time I played it, the engine the game runs on almost broke my old computer. Now, I’m on a new fresh one – so I thought it was time to play through this science-fiction time-travel epic in full graphical glory, and maximized FPS.

Let us continue on that note. The visuals, all these years later, are still absolutely fantastic beyond just having high-quality textures. With that I mean, lighting, location design, structures, and models, in general, make the game come alive. It just looks great, and realistic, yet, has this slight futuristic corporate vibe to it that is common in near-future settings – a bit similar to the modern Deus Ex games. Unfortunately, even now when I have “up-scaling” turned off, some areas are still looking blurry, which is disappointing. Otherwise, the game runs well on my new rig, but, unfortunately, I get drastic FPS drop in scene-transfers, and when cut-scenes change to gameplay. I don’t know why that is. It’s not too bad I guess, but still an annoyance since it happens fairly often. I assume it’s an issue with the engine, because CONTROL, a more recently released Remedy game, shares the same engine, and I didn’t have these kinds of issues here. The only thing I can assume from this is that the engine got better optimized between the games. Nonetheless, the game looks remarkable still, and will not disappoint on a modern computer with a good GPU.

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Halo – Episode 1 impressions

Didn’t plan to watch this considering the recent track record of Halo (Yes, even Halo Infinite), and in general games to movie adaptations… But, as a fan of Halo at least one time long ago, I had to give it a go. I have always liked the universe, the struggle and the military aspect of it – so if enough of that stuff gets transferred over it should be an okay watch, right? Well, what can I say, it does keep some details of the games, like names and the general universe setting, overall, though, I found the whole thing pretty abysmal with it being Halo on a visual level only.

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SKALD: Against the Black Priory – C-64 retro RPG prologue

Demos – how I both love & hate this concept. It’s always nice to get to try the game you are looking forward to, but if it’s good, you are in for a brutal time of waiting since you know what you will be getting and being held backed from. SKALD is one of these games. While I grew up during the popularity of Commodore 64 – I don’t have much of a connection to it beyond playing the random game on its system at a friends house. So, this graphical throwback is not doing much for me from a nostalgic standpoint, regardless I do think the graphics look charming without having the needed nostalgia glasses.

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Alpha Polaris – The Crevasse of Madness

Alpha Polaris is a point & click adventure game from the Finnish studio Turmoil Games, their first, and unfortunately only game. From what I remember reading about them, they had no idea of the work they took on when creating this game. They thought it was going to be a relatively easy thing, but as it turned out making games is a tough job. This regrettably led to Turmoil Games disbanding (from what I know!), and while Alpha Polaris is a fine piece of entertainment it does fall apart a bit at the end, as in it comes a bit fast. Even so, I find it an awesome tale, and as it is known, adventure games live or die depending on the setting and story.

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Operation: Black Mesa – More non-Valve Half-Life

This title caught my eye the other day, and perhaps it wouldn’t have if the remake of the original Half-Life wasn’t as good as it was. I’m of course talking about Black Mesa, which in my personal opinion was a fantastic re-imagining, and throwback to the classic game. So what is Operation: Black Mesa, then? Well, it’s a remake of the expansions Blue Shift and Opposing Force that were released for Half-Life back in the day as additional content expanding on the lore.

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