Hayley Logic:

“$30 is too much to buy my own copy of Tomb Raider for PS4. Better buy a PC instead.”

Okay, so it’s not quite that simple, but Tomb Raider was kind of a tipping point in a way.

I’ve been a mac person for the better part of a decade now (2004ish) and though you can game on a mac (hello bootcamp), I tend to buy laptops which tend to have horrible video cards for gaming.

Even so, I’ve gotten away with playing things on my woefully underpowered laptops, such as Tomb Raider on my macbook air of all things. It was playable, but I definitely would not have wanted that to be my first experience of Tomb Raider.

So for a year now, I’ve been thinking about getting a proper desktop. Especially since I somehow got sucked into the fervor of the steam sales (though I tended to only buy things I thought might actually be playable on my laptop).

In some bizarre way, the fact that I’m going to lose my copy of Tomb Raider (library owns it), really got the whole PC idea back into my head.

So yeah. I have a PC now.

Actually, I’m seriously hoping I can turn it into a proper hackintosh. I only tolerate windows long enough to launch a game. But anyhow.

I even built the thing. In fact, the last PC I had was actually one I built.

That thing never worked quite right.

In retrospect, I wonder if it was the power supply. It was a blessed time of buying generic cases that came with even more generic power supplies and from what I’ve been learning this time around, the power supply is one piece of non-sexy kit that you actually don’t want to skimp on.

I don’t have a problem at all with swapping hardware components around, but something about the from-scratch build terrifies me.

And good grief, with all of the talk about bent pins and completely trashing your motherboard and/or CPU.

But somehow, it all seems to have worked out.

I just streamed a couple of hours of Tomb Raider from the PC through OBS.

tomb raider on PC

I’ve played Tomb Raider on the PS3 (library copy), PC (owned), and PS4 (library copy again) and really, I don’t think I can tell the difference.

I can tell the difference when standing still. Or from obvious things like Lara’s character model being different on the PS4, but basically, if the game is running at at least 30 frames a second, then I don’t really notice a difference.

I’m not much of a member of the PC master race.

Tangent: I think the whole wars over PC vs. console, console vs. other console are just plain dumb in general. There are arguments for both sides. For me, from here on out, I’ll probably just be going for whatever’s cheapest, unless there’s a compelling reason to go with one platform over another. And one thing that PC doesn’t have right now is the equivalent of library rentals of games. $5 during a steam sale is nice; but free is even nicer.

So, I don’t know yet if I’ll officially start speedrunning Tomb Raider on PC.

Unlike PS4, I own a copy, so I’ll be able to play it whenever I bloody well please, so there’s that.

There’s also the fact that the PC speedrun is the shortest of all the platforms. I like that. (This is assuming that I can learn the tricks that make it that short.)

Possibly the biggest argument for the PC speedrun, for me, is the unlimited saves. I can’t speak for the other platforms, but PS3/PS4 are limited to 3 freaking save slots. What this means is that you can basically only ever work on two tricks at a time. This is because you need that third slot to back up whatever you’re working on so that you don’t accidentally overwrite your save by triggering a new checkpoint.

One thing that’s super cool is that I can actually use my DS4 controller on the PC version. So in some ways I get to practice the PS4 speedrun using the PC version.

For instance, I’ve learned that the radio tower skip that involves getting out of bounds seems to work in nearly the same way. At least the initial positioning seems to be the same. There are differences once you’re out of bounds though, such as the PC version has a solid obstacle on your way up the slope that you can get stuck on (only a big deal if you’re actively being shot at). And then there are visual differences between the PS4 and PC once you’re out of bounds, though they don’t appear to actually affect anything.

And speaking of controllers, so far my play style seems to be a mix of keyboard and controller. Like I’m on the controller 90% of the time, but I’m using the keyboard to:

  • execute the door clipping glitch - I think this one is impossible without pause buffering…. which appears to be impossible on the PS4 since the framerate is too high (though I have never tried this on the PS3 version… maybe it’s just that I can’t mash keys quickly enough)
  • skip cutscenes (spacebar versus hitting the share button on the DS4 - the problem with the share button is that if you’re not in a cutscene, it brings up the map - which is not true of just mashing spacebar)
  • do some of the quicktime events (I find mashing left/right to be more comfortable than wiggling the controller stick wildly)

However, the PC version apparently isn’t without its faults.

Here was a fun wolf glitch, where the slowmo lasted for ages:

I’ve never seen that happen before. My only guess is that it happened because I had the bow “charged” for too long. Got me.

And a mere minute or two later, the game completely tanked:

Again, another one of those “this has never happened to me before” moments. But I had also never had to fight a wolf one on one in a QTE, so maybe the QTE somehow led to the crash. Or heck, maybe even the slowmo wolf glitch led to this crash.

OBS quality issues

So here’s a good place to mention that the quality of my vids suck.

From what I’ve seen so far, with OBS, you’re somewhat screwed if you’ve got sucky internet because it appears to produce as low of quality hard disk recordings as what you see on your stream. I’m hoping that it’s just because I’m missing a setting somewhere (OBS noob after all) and that this is fixable.

My streams direct from the PS4 still suck, but they suck worse with OBS.

And tonight, there also seemed to be far more pixelation and, um, “screen tear” (whatever it is, it reminds me of the CMOS rolling shutter problem) on the recordings I made tonight.

I don’t remember my elgato -> OBS recordings having that wonky look, so hopefully at least the rolling-shutter type problem is fixable.

I’m kind of stuck with the internet I’ve got, but I’ll be really disappointed if I can’t figure out a way to produce better hard disk recordings.

On the plus side, it sounds like elgato’s next major version will support exactly what I’d like: flawless local recordings while still being able to stream live.

And finally, I may have a computer fast enough to support it all.