Month: May 2022

Whatever Happened To Bits In Gaming?

Little Bits of Gaming & Movies

Growing up in and through the 80s and being an avid gamer, ‘bits’ was the buzzword to use. You’d just throw it into random gaming conversations, even if you really didn’t know what you were talking about, in an attempt to sound like you knew what you were talking about. Bits, they were everywhere for a couple of decades.

This site’s name even comes from the whole bits thing too. Little Bits of Gaming (as was the site name before I added moves to the mix) came about for a couple of reasons. First was due to the fact that I originally wrote smaller articles that you could read in a couple of minutes about gaming. So the main aim of this blog was to provide ‘little bits of gaming’. The second reason was the whole bits connection to gaming.

BITS SCREEN 1

I’m sure younger readers will have no idea what I’m…

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Improve the Sound of Your Microphone by Adding a De-Esser in OBS

In Third Person

When your voice gets recorded or broadcasted through a microphone, it oftentimes emphasizes the harsh tones that occur when you make certain sounds with your voice. In particular, sibilant consonants such as “s” and “z” are overemphasized through a microphone and create tones that are unpleasant to listen to. You don’t want to drive viewers away because it hurts their ears every time you say words like “snake”, “sand”, or “zebra”.

Thankfully, minimizing those unpleasant tones can be done through a de-esser. You can set one up in OBS within a matter of minutes with the help of this guide. Kudos to Atomic Overdrive for almost all of this information, as I followed their guide while trying to resolve my sibilance issues and am largely adapting their knowledge in this post. However, I will try to add any extra insight I have to make this a more complete guide for…

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Notable Games Coming to PlayStation, PC, and Xbox This Week — 30th May to 5th June

A new month is upon us and the week’s releases are rather interesting, to say the least. The pickings are rather small, but there are definitely a few noteworthy titles in the list, particularly driving sim SnowRunner which gets a PlayStation 5 port this week, and the upcoming Indie title SILT.

SnowRunner (image © 2021 Saber Interactive, Focus Entertainment)

Here are the new games coming to PS5, PS4, PC, and Xbox this week across both physical and digital formats so you will know what’s coming out for your favorite Sony or Microsoft systems. Enjoy and remember to come back every week for all info about game releases!

31 May

© 2021 Saber Interactive, Focus Entertainment

  • SnowRunner | PS5 & PS4
    (also on: PC, Xbox Series X, XB1)

1 June

© 2022 Spiral Circus Limited, Spiral Circus Games, Sold-Out Software, Fireshine Games

  • SILT | PS5 & PS4
    (also…

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Sony Wants 1.5 Million PSR2 Units for Launch

According to Ming-Chi Kuo, a reliable supply chain analyst, Sony has plans to manufacture 1.5 million PSVR2 headsets for the second half of this year. However, Kuo, an employee at TF International Securities, noted that the virtual reality device could ultimately drop in early 2023, depending on the “development schedule” of game titles.

Sony has mentioned its intention to have more than 20 “major” launch titles available for PSVR2.

Push Square notes that this would be an aggressive start for the headset, seeing as how it took over a year for the original PSVR to sell 2 million units on the…

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AD&D, Anxiety, and the Homebrew

Roleplay Rescue’s Blog

It’s a combination of anxiety and self-doubt that keeps blocking my path towards building the game I really want to play. Saturday’s decision to revisit Dungeons & Dragons was completely what I needed to do but it also repeated my self-sabotage whenever I homebrew my own flavour of classic fantasy roleplaying.

AD&D Realisations

Yesterday I sat down and rolled up two characters using D&D1e and D&D5e. I learned a whole load about Quick Character Creation – a necessary element I will need to have for my Open Table Hiraeth game – but I also reminded myself about a whole load of stuff that I don’t like about those games.

One of the illuminating things was realising that the reason why AD&D separated many core rules (such as the combat tables) from the Players Handbook and placed them in the Dungeon Masters Guide was likely due to Gygax’s methodology. Repeated mentions…

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Greybreaker Fortified Mine

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Greybreaker Fortified Mine
Greybreaker Fortified Mine (300 dpi promo)

Led by Druthik Greybreaker, a team of dwarves built, worked, and eventually abandoned the Greybreaker Mine in the hills of Khalefteg to extract a small vein of silver and mithril. The high value of the mithril and the annoyance of the prince of Khalefteg required a certain amount of fortification to keep raiders, bandits, and the prince’s forces at bay as they worked the mine. The deposits proved smaller than expected and the mine was only run for a few years before the Greybreakers moved on to other claims.

Greybreaker Fortified Mine
Greybreaker Fortified Mine (1200 dpi)

Well beyond the walls of the fortifications are a number of tailings piles and a very nice gravel road down out of the hills to the river to ship out the recovered ore. The fortifications themselves are the minimum needed to keep raiders out – not designed for a siege…

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Open Hiraeth: Choosing D&D?

Roleplay Rescue’s Blog

Experimentation with Dungeons & Dragons behind the screen (played with Old-School Essentials) proved highly successful and has me itching to develop the world of Hiraeth as an Open Table game for my friends. Recent developments with my teaching career – in finding a new school upon which to inflict a fresh Dungeons & DragonsClub – have given me pause on exactly how I might run this new game.

Open Table Gaming

The Open Table concept was proposed by The Alexandrian back in 2016 and it has long been an aspiration for me to develop something in the same spirit. He suggests it’s the roleplaying game equivalent of playing catch with your kids so as to introduce them to baseball. I suppose the British analogy would be kicking around a football with your mates. In other words, we are offering an informal pick-up game which anyone can drop into.

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D&D’s Newest Resource Pool Blends Proficiency Scaling and Arcane Recovery

ThinkDM

On May 23, 2022, Wizards of the Coast released the Giant Options Unearthed Arcana (UA), with new subclasses and feats. The Runecrafter Wizard, which D&D Principal Rules Designer Jeremy Crawford describes as “the sibling of the Rune Knight,” features new resource tech for 5th Edition.

Proficiency Scaling

Back in early 2020, D&D started testing proficiency scaling. Under this system, features receive a number of uses per long rest equal to the character’s proficiency bonus. This marked a design shift away from features that: (a) reset on short rests, and (b) give a number of uses based on an ability score modifier.

Runecrafter Scaling

The Runecrafter introduces a new resource paradigm by blending these two concepts. At level 2, Runic Empowerment grants the wizard subclass a number of runes they can append when casting a leveled spell. The rune tech relies on proficiency scaling, giving you a number of runes…

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What Do I Know About First Impressions? Unearthed Arcana 2022 Giant Options

What Do I Know?

5114v+pI9gL._SX380_BO1,204,203,200_Huge Unearthed Arcana dropped yesterday (as of the time that I’m writing this). And by huge, I mean giant. And by giant, I mean it’s about giants. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s take a look at this.

If you haven’t encountered Unearthed Arcana before, these are the playtest documents that Wizards of the Coast release a few months before rules get included in products, which are followed up in a few weeks by a survey. I’m going to take a look at these and give you my initial thoughts on all of this content.

Options

The following options appear in this Unearthed Arcana:

  • Path of the Giant (Barbarian subclass)
  • Circle of the Primeval (Druid subclass)
  • Runecrafter (Wizard subclass)
  • Feats (9 new feats, elemental, giant, and rune themed)

Path of the Giant

The Path of the Giant subclass has the following abilities at different levels:

  • 3rd–Giant Power, Giant’s Havoc

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Bio Break’s 20 Most Wanted Games

Bio Break

I was sitting down to revise one of my sidebar panels to turn it into a top 20 “most wanted” games list, and I thought I should also make this into a quick post. Here are the 20 games — single-player, multiplayer, mobile, and MMO — that I am most looking forward to playing as of right now. No particular order.

  1. The Sims 5 — I’m really curious what a new iteration might look like, and I wouldn’t mind a fresh start, either.
  2. The Outer Worlds 2 – Loved the first RPG to pieces, especially its game world, and am really psyched about a sequel.
  3. Starfield — I and everyone else am exceedingly curious what Bethesda is cooking with this scifi RPG.
  4. Two Point Campus — Sure, I’d be down for a college management game. Could be a lot more fun than a hospital!
  5. Nightingale — The Victorian angle is…

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