Sky Pirate's Den
Thursday, February 11, 2016
A Fairly Good Match
To be honest I did kinda play like shit here, but the times that I did do well were pretty damn good. I was just gonna make the first KO a highlight of the day gyf at first but then I pulled off that nice string on the second stock and I figured I'd might as well embed the whole video. This guy was really good with several different characters (and also really cool and not an asshole like 99% of the other good players I meet who leave in the middle of the match for no reason), and I was glad I was able to hold up well against him as this new character. He even said I was pretty good, which was awesome. There's going to be a Smash 4 tourney this weekend and I'm hoping to see what I can get out of Corrin in that event.
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Smash 4 Highlight of the Day (Yet Another Corrin Post)
I once considered switching to Corrin as my main simply from the fact that every asshole abusing Link on For Glory suddenly shits the bed when I play as her. Of course I'm still sticking with ZSS, but Corrin is definitely my Number Two. Sorry Samus and Peach! You guys just have too many weaknesses for me to get a handle of. Sorry Roy! You're insanely good but also pretty boring for me.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Smash 4 Highlight of the Day
Day 2 with Corrin and I'm still pulling off all this crazy shit. Corrin's down air has to be the best "suicide" down-air in the game, because it's really not a suicide move at all. You can jump at the very last possible moment to not only ensure your opponent dies first but also, if your opponent has another stock, you can recover by side-b onto the wall of the stage (that's the catch, the stage MUST have a wall), and then jumping and then up-b back to the ledge. Usually I just mash the fuck out of the jump button and try to do the side-b the moment my opponent is dead as I would've jumped by then and it's sometimes hard to tell if you made it. One of Corrin's more hilarious jank tricks I must say.
Friday, February 5, 2016
Smash 4 Highlight of the Day
Thought this was going away, did you (also crap this gif came out like shit, you'll have to click on it, or wait for it to adjust)? Technically though I am not really continuing this anymore, but Corrin came out and of course the first match I have against Link (who I hate with a burning passion) I fucking wrecked his ass.
Okay so it's not that impressive I guess but I shat the bed when this happened so on here it goes.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Mah New Rig
How is it that I've had this new computer for two months now and I still haven't said anything about it on this blog? Well, because I've been too busy playing it, of course!
At long last, though, I'm starting to get pretty burnt out from playing it so much, and tonight especially since I got a pretty bad headache, so I decided to write for a change. I'm thinking of throwing up two posts here: first, this post talking about my new computer and my experience with it and stuff. Then my next post will be a quickie on my thoughts about WoW and Legion and stuff (by the way I am super hyped). But without further digression, let's jump right into my computer.
Before this semester started, I was really looking into putting together a nice computer. I was getting fed up with the performance issues I was having on my laptop, and there were points where I was getting performance that was even pettier than what these "next-gen" consoles offer. So for some reason, my school decided I was worthy of receiving a grant over the summer. This money turned out to be far much more than I needed to even pay off the rest of my tuition, so I was able to split it up and buy an awesome PC with the leftovers. At first, I looked into this by going to TigerDirect and checking out what the top-end stuff would total out to be. My calculations brought me to well over a thousand, which was way out of my budget (I was hoping no more than eight-hundred USD), and thus I went home depressed and thinking maybe it really did cost that much to put together a great computer that would leave consoles in the dust. I knew that, for the same price as a console, I could build a PC that could somewhat outperform consoles, but that's on the same settings as to what games are locked to on those systems. What I wanted was near, if not complete max settings, on 1080p, at sixty frames per second. After spending the day at TigerDirect that day, my dreams seemed shattered... and then, I went on the PCMasterRace subreddit. God bless that place.
On the PCMR sub, I found a build that did exactly what I wanted for a hundred dollars under the budget I had set out. I didn't want to mess around and do my own thing too much, partially for fear of fucking up the computer, but also for fear of not being too savvy with shopping for parts as evidenced by my trip to TigerDirect, but I did switch out some of the things that were listed for a couple of better parts (which were, granted, also suggested on the thing but hey I was bold enough to make changes for myself!). I will upload some pictures soon, but for now here is the list of parts I put together!
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
And my goodness, those prices dropped so much in just a few months! Although in actuality, for some reason the video card (which is probably the most critical component for my gaming experience) doesn't have a price listed (it might still be trying to get a price from Newegg, which is the retailer I bought it from, and Newegg might not have that card anymore, I don't know), so the price would probably be another couple hundred dollars. Maybe less, since apparently now the R9 390 is around the same price I got my 290 for. I feel a little bad about it, partially because I've had to really cut down on spending in pretty much all other facets of my life, but also because now, so soon after I bought my computer, there are better parts for about the same price. But I guess that's just the way it's going to always be with computers. I feel like things move just so fast, all I can really do is find what will certainly last and be relevant for a few years before I have to upgrade. And my R9 290 is still quite a damn good card. I think the processor could stand for an upgrade already, but first of all things, I need to get an SSD, an actual mouse, and an actual keyboard (my mouse and keyboard are spare parts I bummed from my dad and my friend). And I could probably stand to get some speakers, although I am fairly certain I have a pair already. Then there are all these games that I want and ugh! Dude, there are like far too many games that I want. There's Metal Gear Solid V, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, the Legion expansion, to an extent I want Overwatch, I want some of the Hearthstone adventure stuff so that I can put together a good deck, I want Fire Emblem Fates (not PC I know but still), I want Star Wars: Battlefront (but this I can literally wait a year for if need be)... the list goes on and on. So many possibilities are now open with this lovely computer! And that's the thing that really brings me satisfaction with this rig. For too long have I dealt with low performance and the mindset of, "If I can play it, I'll be okay." Ever since my roommate in my sophomore year introduced me to the whole PC Master Race "movement"(?), I've dreamed of one day getting to put together a computer that would render consoles obsolete, and that I can pretty much say I've achieved.
So yeah, that's my build. Not very original but it's still damn good nonetheless. I actually pretty much put it together by myself. My friends helped me just a teeny bit. The rest I figured out for myself, and I was pretty OCD about the whole thing, I'll admit. I used an anti-static mat (I mean come on, my entire apartment is covered with carpet), I was super nervous about forcing things, I was super nervous about pressing the cables into their places (forcing things) and putting them in the wrong places, and to make matters worse my case has a really weird hard-drive bay where it's more like a wall and you hang the hard drives off the side. When I finally put the whole thing together, I was certain I had fucked something up. When I turned on my computer, everything sounded like it was turning on, but I was getting a really strange clicking sound, and there was no video coming up on my monitor (I had used a monitor that only supported a VGA connection for a while).
I panicked and was convinced I had fucked something up. In my frantic breakdown, I called a friend and told him what happened and almost broke down into tears. He then asked me if I put in the video card. I said yes. He asked if I had it connected to an HDMI monitor. I said no. He said, Yeah, go do that. So I plugged it into the HD TV in my apartment's living room, the only HD anything I had in this place, and it worked! Very few times in my life had I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief. So I got my computer set up, eventually managed to save up for an actual HD monitor with HDMI support, and now here I am today, enjoying BioShock Infinite on complete max settings, 1080p, and running at over eighty frames per second (although I only see sixty because my monitor is 60Hz, but it's nice to know my PC can run it an extra twenty frames than what I was aiming for)! The only game I've been weary with has been World of Warcraft. Sometimes, my framerate in certain places would drop to the thirties and forties. The game's recommendations for my settings are on the High preset, but I can set almost everything to max (SSAO needs to be on high and not on the nVidia setting aka Sabotage AMD Card Setting, and the anti-aliasing has to be brought down to MSAA x8 but even that's still pretty damn good).
What a lot of stuff I've read seems to be indicating though is that the CPU is really what's bottlenecking the game for me, not the graphics card. It's a bit of a shame but it's not a huge deal. I rarely have performance issues in raids (in which I have the settings lowered anyway), 99% of the places I've been to in the open world run pretty much over sixty frames per second, and dungeons are pretty much where the glory is (I can keep things max settings and still be well over sixty frames since it's not as straining on my CPU, I guess?). And this is fairly much limited to WoW. Now granted, I haven't really played that many other games on my desktop, but I have played The Talos Principal's demo, and even on the maximum settings, I still get over ninety frames per second in the benchmark, which completely blows my mind.
That's all I've got to really say for now. It's so amazing to be finally living the dream with this computer, and I look forward to playing all these "next-gen" games on it!
At long last, though, I'm starting to get pretty burnt out from playing it so much, and tonight especially since I got a pretty bad headache, so I decided to write for a change. I'm thinking of throwing up two posts here: first, this post talking about my new computer and my experience with it and stuff. Then my next post will be a quickie on my thoughts about WoW and Legion and stuff (by the way I am super hyped). But without further digression, let's jump right into my computer.
Before this semester started, I was really looking into putting together a nice computer. I was getting fed up with the performance issues I was having on my laptop, and there were points where I was getting performance that was even pettier than what these "next-gen" consoles offer. So for some reason, my school decided I was worthy of receiving a grant over the summer. This money turned out to be far much more than I needed to even pay off the rest of my tuition, so I was able to split it up and buy an awesome PC with the leftovers. At first, I looked into this by going to TigerDirect and checking out what the top-end stuff would total out to be. My calculations brought me to well over a thousand, which was way out of my budget (I was hoping no more than eight-hundred USD), and thus I went home depressed and thinking maybe it really did cost that much to put together a great computer that would leave consoles in the dust. I knew that, for the same price as a console, I could build a PC that could somewhat outperform consoles, but that's on the same settings as to what games are locked to on those systems. What I wanted was near, if not complete max settings, on 1080p, at sixty frames per second. After spending the day at TigerDirect that day, my dreams seemed shattered... and then, I went on the PCMasterRace subreddit. God bless that place.
On the PCMR sub, I found a build that did exactly what I wanted for a hundred dollars under the budget I had set out. I didn't want to mess around and do my own thing too much, partially for fear of fucking up the computer, but also for fear of not being too savvy with shopping for parts as evidenced by my trip to TigerDirect, but I did switch out some of the things that were listed for a couple of better parts (which were, granted, also suggested on the thing but hey I was bold enough to make changes for myself!). I will upload some pictures soon, but for now here is the list of parts I put together!
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor | $172.89 @ OutletPC |
| Motherboard | Asus Z97-E ATX LGA1150 Motherboard | $86.98 @ Newegg |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory | $38.43 @ SuperBiiz |
| Storage | Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive | $44.89 @ OutletPC |
| Video Card | Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB Vapor-X Video Card | |
| Case | Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case | $55.99 @ SuperBiiz |
| Power Supply | EVGA 850W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply | $64.99 @ NCIX US |
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts | ||
| Total (before mail-in rebates) | $514.17 | |
| Mail-in rebates | -$50.00 | |
| Total | $464.17 | |
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-14 06:13 EST-0500 |
And my goodness, those prices dropped so much in just a few months! Although in actuality, for some reason the video card (which is probably the most critical component for my gaming experience) doesn't have a price listed (it might still be trying to get a price from Newegg, which is the retailer I bought it from, and Newegg might not have that card anymore, I don't know), so the price would probably be another couple hundred dollars. Maybe less, since apparently now the R9 390 is around the same price I got my 290 for. I feel a little bad about it, partially because I've had to really cut down on spending in pretty much all other facets of my life, but also because now, so soon after I bought my computer, there are better parts for about the same price. But I guess that's just the way it's going to always be with computers. I feel like things move just so fast, all I can really do is find what will certainly last and be relevant for a few years before I have to upgrade. And my R9 290 is still quite a damn good card. I think the processor could stand for an upgrade already, but first of all things, I need to get an SSD, an actual mouse, and an actual keyboard (my mouse and keyboard are spare parts I bummed from my dad and my friend). And I could probably stand to get some speakers, although I am fairly certain I have a pair already. Then there are all these games that I want and ugh! Dude, there are like far too many games that I want. There's Metal Gear Solid V, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, the Legion expansion, to an extent I want Overwatch, I want some of the Hearthstone adventure stuff so that I can put together a good deck, I want Fire Emblem Fates (not PC I know but still), I want Star Wars: Battlefront (but this I can literally wait a year for if need be)... the list goes on and on. So many possibilities are now open with this lovely computer! And that's the thing that really brings me satisfaction with this rig. For too long have I dealt with low performance and the mindset of, "If I can play it, I'll be okay." Ever since my roommate in my sophomore year introduced me to the whole PC Master Race "movement"(?), I've dreamed of one day getting to put together a computer that would render consoles obsolete, and that I can pretty much say I've achieved.
So yeah, that's my build. Not very original but it's still damn good nonetheless. I actually pretty much put it together by myself. My friends helped me just a teeny bit. The rest I figured out for myself, and I was pretty OCD about the whole thing, I'll admit. I used an anti-static mat (I mean come on, my entire apartment is covered with carpet), I was super nervous about forcing things, I was super nervous about pressing the cables into their places (forcing things) and putting them in the wrong places, and to make matters worse my case has a really weird hard-drive bay where it's more like a wall and you hang the hard drives off the side. When I finally put the whole thing together, I was certain I had fucked something up. When I turned on my computer, everything sounded like it was turning on, but I was getting a really strange clicking sound, and there was no video coming up on my monitor (I had used a monitor that only supported a VGA connection for a while).
I panicked and was convinced I had fucked something up. In my frantic breakdown, I called a friend and told him what happened and almost broke down into tears. He then asked me if I put in the video card. I said yes. He asked if I had it connected to an HDMI monitor. I said no. He said, Yeah, go do that. So I plugged it into the HD TV in my apartment's living room, the only HD anything I had in this place, and it worked! Very few times in my life had I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief. So I got my computer set up, eventually managed to save up for an actual HD monitor with HDMI support, and now here I am today, enjoying BioShock Infinite on complete max settings, 1080p, and running at over eighty frames per second (although I only see sixty because my monitor is 60Hz, but it's nice to know my PC can run it an extra twenty frames than what I was aiming for)! The only game I've been weary with has been World of Warcraft. Sometimes, my framerate in certain places would drop to the thirties and forties. The game's recommendations for my settings are on the High preset, but I can set almost everything to max (SSAO needs to be on high and not on the nVidia setting aka Sabotage AMD Card Setting, and the anti-aliasing has to be brought down to MSAA x8 but even that's still pretty damn good).
What a lot of stuff I've read seems to be indicating though is that the CPU is really what's bottlenecking the game for me, not the graphics card. It's a bit of a shame but it's not a huge deal. I rarely have performance issues in raids (in which I have the settings lowered anyway), 99% of the places I've been to in the open world run pretty much over sixty frames per second, and dungeons are pretty much where the glory is (I can keep things max settings and still be well over sixty frames since it's not as straining on my CPU, I guess?). And this is fairly much limited to WoW. Now granted, I haven't really played that many other games on my desktop, but I have played The Talos Principal's demo, and even on the maximum settings, I still get over ninety frames per second in the benchmark, which completely blows my mind.
That's all I've got to really say for now. It's so amazing to be finally living the dream with this computer, and I look forward to playing all these "next-gen" games on it!
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Death of the Grim Patron Warrior (Thank God)
Basically, Warsong Commander has been nerfed to give minions with charge plus one attack. This effectively makes Warsong Commander a shittier version of Raid Leader, with plus one health and a situational effect. So yeah this is pretty shitty, they made a basic card completely worthless, blah blah.
I think I am going to just throw this out there right now. If you're expecting an intelligent discussion on the meta of Hearthstone and the repercussions this nerf will create, go to the Hearthstone subreddit for that, because I am here to say THANK FUCKING GOD THEY PUT AN END TO THIS LAZY, CHEAP-ASS FUCKING DECK.
My first experience with Grim Patron was online in a match where somebody just one-turn-killed me. I'm not an insanely competitive player with loads of great cards at my disposal, but I like to think that my Warlock deck is fairly decent (it is currently in the process of becoming a wonderful demon deck). Still, when that happened, I wasn't even mad at first. I was in awe that somebody could pull off such a hilarious looking combo. I even wanted to jump on the bandwagon for this deck at first. I played a couple of other Grim Patron Warriors online and managed to curb-stomp them, so I figured, "This deck can't be so bad." But then the reality of how broken it truly was settled in when I lost to three warriors in a row in the same exact fashion of them having the answer to every taunt I would put down, and then proceeding to OTK me with their stupid as fuck combo. Literally every warrior managed to shut down my taunts, get an Emporer Thaurissan out, and then play the magical super combo that had no counters whatsoever. Every time, my taunts got shut down. Then they play Thaurissan, and I can either taunt and attempt to block as much damage as I could and then still lose on my next turn because even if I could block one or two attacks from the bullshit combo, there would still be enough minions plus the Frothing Berserker to just kill me anyway, or I could remove the card, stopping me from getting hit for five damage and also stopping my opponent from lowering the mana cost of any more cards, but then I would have nothing on my board to protect me from being hit. This happened three games against warriors in a row. At that point, I just autoconceded to any warrior I came across. If they want to remove all the fun out of the game from me, I'll do the same for them by not even giving them a match to enjoy their bullshit.
This nerf isn't in effect yet, and I think I heard it comes in next week. Still, I'm glad to know that the end to that bullshit is finally on the damn horizon. Sorry if you played Grim Patron and feel like Blizzard took a massive shit on you, but this was seriously just way too much fucking power that was way too accessible for almost literally anybody who just picked up the goddamn game to use. At the end of the day it really wasn't even the fact that Grim Patron Warrior could OTK me, it was knowing that there was a deck out there that took relatively little effort to put together and even less so to play it at all while my Warlock deck -- which I have been working on for months, still isn't finished, takes some strategy to use correctly, and is very satisfying to win with and actually somewhat viable (when it is finished that'll change to very viable) -- will get crushed by such a cheap, low-effort deck pretty much ninety-nine percent of the time.
I guess the answer then would be to put together a new deck. Unfortunately I do not have enough time and money flowing through my veins to be able to have access to a variety of counters for everything. I've come to accept this as well, really. I've come to accept that a crazy mana-ramp Druid or a Mage with constant removal is going to kick my deck's ass. What sets those apart from Grim Patron is, again, the time it took to make those decks and the level of skill it takes to play them. A lot of people have been claiming that Grim Patron allegedly takes a "lot" of skill to play, but from what I've seen of win ratios and from all these stories I hear of, "I got my friend into Hearthstone and showed him this deck because it's cheap to put together," I cannot see how that is the case when just about anyone who has a simple grasp of how to deal with RNG can win.
So once again, sorry Grim Patron Warriors, but your cheap-ass deck can die in a motherfucking fire. I'll be gladly taking back a place in your playing field with my Voidcaller into Fearsome Doomguards and Defender of Argus combos, thank you very much.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Smash 4 Replays on YouTube
All right, the video I uploaded is indeed pretty crappy. This guy on For Glory was pretty bad. What I should've done was saved this replay of this awesome match against a Mario player (yo Ace if you're out there reading this blog for some reason, you are the man!) because that match was epic, but it was three minutes and eight seconds and I unfortunately forgot that it doesn't seem like the limit on how long your replays can be is exactly always three minutes on the dot. Somebody I know, at least, was able to upload a replay at three minutes and twelve seconds, so who knows.
So yeah, this replay sucks. But that up-b ko that I got was pretty rad. And the rage quit was pretty funny. So here it goes. I wouldn't call these highlights, though... oh wait a minute, my tag for these is simply SM4SH. Ok never mind, I can organize these neatly then. Hopefully there will be better replays to come, or I just get a capture device real soon so that I can actually upload this stuff in 1080p full FPS and without a time limit. I don't get how Nintendo manages to mess up doing the right thing, but whatever.
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