Huh. One of those BB stores is 5 minutes from my house.

Still no forums/user reviews, though. Of course not!

So, I’ve been to Chicago and New York, and intentionally sought out several pizza places in both.
Chicago definitely wins, IMO. There wasn’t a single place I went to that wasn’t top-notch. New York had too many “this is just Luca Pizza with a different name”.
But
There’s a pizza place native to Indiana called Greek’s, and their primary difference is their sauce is actually…sweet. Not like, candy-sweet. It’s not for everyone, but if you dig it, hot DAMN it is delicious. It’s not wood-fired or anything, it’s honestly pretty basic aside from the sauce, but the sauce and the crust are the only places you can make a real difference when comparing standard pies. If you ever drive through Indiana, try Greek’s. You may hate it! Or you may find you have a new occasional craving, that you have to unfortunately visit Indiana to quell.

Also if you hate it, and on your return trip pass through Indianapolis, try Yats. There are several of them, it’s not pizza; it’s cajun food. They have a chili cheese etoufee with crawfish that is unbelievable.

RogueSix wrote on Jul 12, 2021, 09:13:

HoSpanky wrote on Jul 11, 2021, 21:23:
According to user reviews, the Steam version of Fh4 is a mess. The windows store version is, surprisingly, the vastly superior one.

What exactly are the differences then?

Steam version was ported, and the work was done by a third party (Sumo, I believe). Patches come in a month or so later than the Windows version, although that's hardly a concern 3 years in.

Most complaints are about frame timing/crashing/friend invites that work perfectly in the MS Store version. WHY these people would purchase the same game twice is beyond me, other than wanting to play with friends who bought it on Steam. Apparently, save data can't be transferred between versions, despite both requiring a microsoft login.

For me personally, I'd rather not deal with a ported version of a game. It's a rare case where a port manages to run as well as the original. Do I like the MS store? No. It sucks pretty hard. But Forza Horizon is the one game worth the PITA the store can be sometimes.

Is it likely those crashes/framerate issues are caused by a stupid PC setup? Oh yes. If you decided you have a ton of ram so you're gonna turn off your swap drive, the game is going to crash for no apparent reason, ESPECIALLY during the Goliath races. That's in both FH3 and 4, and I'd be surprised if FH5 didn't do the same thing. The framerate issues could be someone who thought they shouldn't have the "framerate smoothing" option turned on. It's there, and always on, for a very good reason.

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Jul 11, 2021, 11:58:
Well as long as it's not an Epic games Store or Micro$oft exclusive I could care less.

So you’re only against SOME exclusives? Christ, what a twat you are. Be against all exclusives, or none. Anything else is pathetic.

According to user reviews, the Steam version of Fh4 is a mess. The windows store version is, surprisingly, the vastly superior one.

shinchan0s wrote on Jul 10, 2021, 18:06:
Sooooo close to finishing the game. It would be a good excuse to pick it up again. I wanted to finish the expansions before starting the endgame, but I didn't expect Touissaint to be so... big.

Finish the main game prior to completing Blood and Wine. It’s designed to be done that way.

Hoping for show-related quests. Pretty sure it's just skins.

If they fixed their absolute garbage physics this time around, they might be able to compete with Forza Horizon. Also, if they cleaned up their streaming system so it doesn’t bounce the framerate all over the place.

That’s a tall, TALL order, though. Playground Games is made of veterans of all the best Simcade racers.

Test drive will have about a month and a half release lead over FH5, and I’m sure that was intentional. I’ll happily buy it if it turns out they beat the odds but…they’re not good odds.

God of War, the Uncharted games, The Last of Us, Spider-man….maybe even Iron man VR and Astro Bot Rescue Mission would all be incredible additions to anyone’s pc library. If even half that list makes it, it’ll be a rousing success.

Oh man, from the description, Wreckfest may look incredibly different, in a good way. The game always had a fairly....basic lighting system, it was the one thing keeping it from looking current-gen. Funny that they clearly ranked that below crossplay and Xbox performance improvements.

Simon Says wrote on Jun 28, 2021, 08:48:
You know what could drastically improve their console performance from the base X1/PS4 all the way up to XsX/PS5?

Implementing FSR, after all, it took an independent solo developer mere hours to get it into his game and after testing it was found older GPUs could run it too as long as they were DX12 capable, which I think X1 and PS4 are, while X1X and PS4Pro are guaranteed to be not to mention XsS/XsX/PS5.

And it's free performance the Consoles and most PC GPUs could certainly use.

Ehh, I've seen conflicting information about it. In some cases it works fine, in others, there's an unacceptable level of artifacting. I'm going 100% off what I've read, I have zero experience with it myself. I *WOULD* bet heavily that it's more problematic with games that use more complex rendering techniques. The Indie coder you mention may not be doing anything that would confuse FSR, while CDPR are undoubtedly working with a far, far more complex system.

If it was as simple as flipping a switch, they'd have done it.

HorrorScope wrote on Jun 24, 2021, 14:12:
Yeah Win11 release is a naming gimmick. It's 10 with a bit of a facelift and updates you'd expect from any other Win10 update. So whatever, they can call it poop on a stick for all I care. It's not like they are charging Win10 owners to upgrade to Win11, right? RIGHT?

So, as a computer repair guy, I’m actually glad to see MS isn’t going to try to keep win10 going “forever”. Otherwise, 20 years from now, cheapasses would pull out hardware that was barely capable of running win10 to begin with and demand we make it run better. I had a customer yesterday who was FURIOUS that I couldn’t reinstall Vista on his laptop.

It’s the software version of Intel’s near-constant socket changes. It helps in keeping people from buying incompatible hardware.

good lord, that's some great-looking lego rendering!

Well, that's likely because Forza Horizon hasn't been anything less than awesome yet. The worst it got was the initial PC release of FH3, which had severe performance issues....issues that were ironed out, although it did take Playground FOREVER to get it done. FH4 worked flawlessly from launch, and there's no reason to suspect 5 won't as well. There will undoubtedly be a demo, so you can see how it runs/looks for yourself.

I really, REALLY hope they eventually catch on to the whole "remaster" thing, and make a Forza game that has ALL the previous areas/expansions. They could even make them all separate paid DLC, I'd happily even re-buy that stuff just to have it all in one executable! I'd love to scoot around in FH2's european villas again, and since you can't buy the Hot Wheels expansion (nor FH3) anymore, it'd be nice to let newcomers experience their craziest expansion ever.

Johnny Depp doesn’t even voice the character. From the trailer, he does a reasonable mimic, but it’s not quite right.

They’re claiming it’s actual story content, so that might make it worth playing. SoT was too reliant on “emergent gameplay” to hold my attention for more than a couple days, having a story to adventure through would probably hold my attention for precisely the length of that story.

Well, they got my money again. Looks like a much more diverse location than FH4, and they even seem to have snuck a tiny bit of the Hot Wheels expansion's insanity in. I still think they should release the Hot Wheels expansion either as a standalone, or maybe make Forza Horizon into Forza World, bringing every location back, and then selling access (or gamepass, of course) to new areas.

The UnMetal trailer was....man, that was pretty damn good. As with most comedy-heavy games, I do worry that I just saw all the best parts, but I've been pleasantly surprised before. Journey to the Savage Planet was quite funny, start to finish, and a spectacular action/puzzle game as well.

Huh. I still think Xortex had a way better idea for it, and it wasn't even a standalone game.

This midway multiverse game has unnecessarily shitty graphics, likely built to work on the Quest standalone.

I'm torn on the Quest headsets....on one hand, they get VR into more homes than VR requiring a PC, and right now, that's a HUGE benefit. Video cards capable of running even midrange VR games cost well over $1000, IF you can even find one. The Quest 2 is quite nice, overall, and a killer deal when you add in the PC compatibility as well.
On the other hand, the headsets bring the visual quality of games down a LONG way. Games made for both are always built with the shittiest hardware as the target, making the PC version look unnecessarily poor. I'm not terribly worried about Quest exclusives, as the hardware is self-contained. It's not the bullshit that Oculus games (the PC ecosystem) pull, where they refuse to support any other headsets. I honestly wish ReVive *HAD* been sued into oblivion, because too many weak-spined players will use it to play games that they've been walled out of. There's no warranty, or support, or anything, when playing that way, yet they charge the same price.

Oh wow! They’re all-in this time, they’ve never said that before!


To be fair, they’ve been doing a good job of releasing PC versions of their first party games. While UWP is a bit annoying, the crossplay it allows for is nice.