I enjoy the immersive sim subgenre of video games, focused on player agency and interlocking systems. I’m also a fan of the games of Arkane, who have made many of those over the years. While Dishonored and Prey rightfully get a lot of love, I haven’t checked out their earlier titles. I decided to give one of their early games, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic a shot. Is it actually interesting? Let’s find out!
Continue readingGaming
Observation on the real-time strategy genre
Quick post sharing a theory I have. The RTS genre’s heyday was in the 90s. What used to be a big category of games that sold really well is mostly a niche, catering to the hardcore – and those just tend to play established games such as Age of Empires 2 or StarCraft. But the interesting thing to me is why it no longer is the case.
Continue readingFixing Returnal hanging at a black screen
I’ve been enjoying Returnal recently, but I’ve had a ton of technical issues with it. Half the time when starting the game, or performing certain actions, it would just hang at a black screen. Sometimes, the game would be still running and updating the system resource monitoring, but be completely unresponsive.
Turns out if you’re running Windows 10 LTSC, you lack the VP9 codec, which the cutscenes are in. The black screen is because it can’t play the cutscene properly. (Any bits about DX11/DX12 seem to be red herrings.) The VP9 codec is on the Windows Store, but since you don’t have that in LTSC, you can install it via other means. For example, this dump in the Internet Archive contains the codecs you’re looking for; install them, and after a reboot, things should work again.
Dealing with the vending machine achievement in Control
I was trying to get the last achievement in Control; killing four of the possessed vending machines that drop loot. Unfortunately, it seems that if you die while one is active, they never seem to respawn again. Even worse, the only way to unbreak this is to use the mission select and take you back to the Endgame chapter, which is after you’ve completed the main campaign. Note that said chapter will have your last progress of the AWE DLC; if you’ve had the issue at Endgame, you’ll need to roll back to an even earlier chapter. For me, I had beat AWE at Endgame, but the vending machines were still untouched.
You’ll lose progress, so make a backup of your saves. I found them in this directory (Steam version, on Linux):
~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/<Steam User ID Here>/870780
After you do what you needed to do, you should be able to roll back to your original saved game and get your progress back. I was able to do this and now I’ve got 100% achievement progress with my original saved game.