Games, many games, frustration at the games ... Stargate ?

I've been having fun with the games today.

Fun in the senses of bashing your head against the wall as well as enjoying playing them.

Yesterday was fine, it was a mix of Skyrim and Motorsport Manager. I've fairly heavily modded Skyrim since getting the Special Edition and it seems far more resilient and stable in that version. It's still pretty much a run across the country randomly murdering people who get in the way though.

And very pretty too as a game. Even as a 7 year old game. I think that screenshot benefits from a water effects mod and I have a pretty town graphics mod too and a series of others. Oh it's also benefiting from being played on a nVidia 1060 card, which is more powerful than any of the cards on the market when Skyrim first came out.

It is still pretty much a murder simulator though as your character runs around doing the quests. I haven't taken a side in the civil war yet in case it causes issues but I know which side I'll take. Similarly, there's one mod which I'll try later that I won't use yet because I think it'll cause issues.

That's the thing with mods, they look great but can cause the issues.

What does get annoying is where the issues aren't caused by the mods, they're inherent in the game itself. That's really frustrating. Problem games recently include :

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol - this would run a bit on my laptop ... and then crash to desktop not long after. Annoying. Haven't gone back to that.
Grey Goo - is a strategy game from a few years ago that I really should have tried before now ! But I fired it up today and had the usual issues where it resizes all of my desktop windows and to top that off, tried to fit itself in a window that wasn't the right size and was black. No joy with that one.

I think that's partly an issue with my monitor actually. It's a fantastic 1440p monitor but ... I have display scaling enabled in order to make the text appear in a size that is readable. However, games get confused by the display scaling. Or they're just obnoxious.

Star Wars Empire at War is the latest for the hall of shame - this one was playable as far as I tried it today but had a massive problem with flickering on the screen. I don't think I have the condition where people have massive issues with flickering but ... I dislike it and it's not something I would want to be tolerating in a game.

(I'm trying Empire at War again due to the dissatisfaction with Stellaris at the moment)

And I had a look at Battletech again today. I quite enjoyed playing through the campaign last year. It's a solid game, if heavily lacking in variety. The standard thing is for your lance of mechs to go into battle against a force around twice its number, albeit weakened. I tried the Roguetech mod again today which ... massively opens up the variety but it proved unsatisfying to play due to massive slowdowns. (It was maxing out the 8GB of memory available in my computer).

So that's 1 good, 4 annoying, last one for today is Motorsport Manager, which continues to be a fun one. I ran through 3 races this morning and my people are starting to win races ...

That one was a bit of an aberration as the AI teams and drivers weren't doing well with the rainy conditions in that qualifying session.

This is a cracking game and the best ever of its type, in my opinion. (There isn't much competition as the last good one was Grand Prix Manager 1/2 in 1996). It's properly testing and will punish mistakes while having a strategic layer that needs figuring out before you start to win.

The team could win the championship this year. We shall see ...

Back to fiction though ...

I've got the Stargate Horizons episode on in another window. It's reminded me about Stargate again. They start it off again in about a week ! Definitely queuing up that one for another watching.

PS If anyone recognises the first dragon pic as being theirs ... please do drop me a comment or an email and I'll supply proper attribution. Google found it from a betting site and I'm definitely not linking to that)