Media - screenshot - Page 2

A screenshot from Diablo II Resurrected in the "Legacy" graphics mode showing the software renderer in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. My Assassin is holding a sword and a small round shield and standing next to a shallow lake with a large tree beside it. It's all extremely pixelated by today's standards.

Another screenshot showing the exact same scene as the previous image, but this time it's using the new 16:9 widescreen high-resolution remastered graphics. It's still not a graphical tour de force of course, but it's a SIGNIFICANT upgrade from the original.

Tonight featured a bit of remastered retro gaming: I started with Star Wars: Dark Forces and then discovered that the Diablo II remaster was on sale for the princely sum of $23! So I picked that up and was delighted to note that it continues the grand tradition of remasters allowing you to flip back and forth between the new and original graphics. Check out this wonderfully pixelated art from 2000 versus the shiny new remastered graphics. And I realised after I'd taken these that that was at the gloriously spacious "800x600" resolution, there's an option to use the 640x480 resolution from the game when it first launched and you can see even less of your surroundings, haha.

The remaster also has a "Performance" or "Quality" toggle for the new graphics, and honestly I don't think I can tell the difference whatsoever except that "Quality" mode drops the framerate to 30fps. Though funnily enough I actually kept that on anyway because the original graphics only run at 30fps so it's much less jarring going from 60fps in the new graphics to 30fps when I switch back to old.

Posted on 16 June 2025, 23:17

A screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 taken from behind and a reasonable way above the car. The car itself is a black 1991 Nissan Pulsar hatchback, that wonderful early 90s not-quite-completely-boxy shape where car designers realised they could round off some of the edges. The car is blasting along a dirt road in the rolling hills of a rural area with dust billowing out behind it, there are a handful of trees around and a bit of scrub and it all looks very dry. There's a wooden telegraph pole at the right with a single cable stretching behind the frame, and out beyond the trees. The overall light in the scene is warm and it looks like it's getting towards late afternoon.

Book-ending the weekend with Forza Horizon! This time I'm blasting around a lot of the dirt tracks to get the "Drive on every single road" achievement.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 9 June 2025, 19:59

It's the Friday night of a three day weekend and I'm in Forza Horizon 5 blasting through the deserts of Mexico in a hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510 while listening to the game's synthwave radio station. 👌🏻

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 6 June 2025, 21:03

A screenshot taken in Forza Horizon 5 of a bright red 1970 Datsun 510 sedan, it's been lowered and has cool yet tasteful black rims on it, small front and rear spoilers, and it's sitting on a rural-looking road with a bunch of quite dry-looking grass and bushes behind it. The sky is blue with fluffy clouds and you can just make out some mountains in the distance.

Right, it's time for some hooning in Forza Horizon 5 in my hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510. 😁 I put a 1.6L inline-four turbocharged rally engine into it, 224kW all up but it only weighs 807kg so it's such a responsive car to drive.

screenshot gaming forza horizon

Posted on 16 April 2025, 18:01

A screenshot of just the sheet music from the current lesson I'm doing, there are four bars and it's almost entirely quarter notes except for one little funky bit with eighth notes at the end of the second bar. So not exactly a complex rhythm but still!

The guy who does the bass guitar course I've been going through did a big refresh of the entire course with every single lesson re-recorded and new and clearer graphics (and much more humour), so I figured I'd just start again from the beginning since I'd only gotten two-thirds of the way through it since getting my bass almost two years ago now. The previous lesson I'd just finished was about sheet music and musical notation, and while I'd already gotten the symbols down (whole note, half note, quarter note, etc.) from learning drums, the actual note names on the sheet music had previous eluded me.

I've been making a point of trying to read the notes just from the sheet music in the Bass Buzz videos rather than solely relying on the tab, and I've just done a lesson where I was able to read the notes from the sheet music AND apply it to where they are on the neck, all without needing the tab! 😁 Very happy!

(Side note, if anyone is wanting to learn bass guitar, I cannot recommend Bass Buzz highly enough, it's absolutely fantastic.)

screenshot bass guitar

Posted on 1 April 2025, 22:01

A screenshot from the end of the pilot episode of Dark Angel, showing Jessica Alba's character standing on top of the Seattle Space Needle. The camera is at a low angle so it's looking up heroically at her, the moon is directly behind her and looking quite yellow, and you can tell it's post-apocalypse because the top of the Space Needle is run-down and there's graffiti on it.

Despite it airing from 2000-2002, I have only just now finished the final episode of Dark Angel!

I've had it on DVD for MANY years now and definitely recall watching at least most of the first season more than once, but for some reason I got distracted or something and never got all the way through it, and hadn't ever started Season 2. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and of course I'm a sucker for any show with an arse-kicking woman as the main character (hello Buffy!). I'm sad there were only two seasons and that it was cancelled, I was reading the Wikipedia entry for it and realised that it's yet another show in the very long tally of "Shows cancelled by Fox", ugh.

Prior to starting Dark Angel, I'd been watching Van Helsing on Netflix, and while the concept is cool (vampires are real, the volcano under Yellowstone erupts and clouds block the sun out so the vampires can multiply and walk freely outside, and humanity is basically enslaved by them), fuck it was a drag... just everyone always doing awful things to each other rather than anything positive. I made it a couple of episodes into Season 2 before I had to bail, and from what I've read The Walking Dead is cut from the same cloth. Really not my cup of tea tbh.

screenshot dark angel

Posted on 8 February 2025, 16:43

A screenshot of the temperature graphs from our sensor at home showing it going from 45˚C at 15:53 down to 33˚C now at 16:13 (and it's still dropping even as I type this description).

Well, the southerly has certainly arrived with a vengeance.

our house screenshot weather grafana

Posted on 28 January 2025, 16:12

A screenshot of my Tiefling Barbarian. She's tall with broad shoulders, dark red skin, black eyes, and two short grey horns protruding up and back from her forehead. Her hair is long on one side and shaved on the other, and her neck is completely tattooed in dark blue, with the top of it being a flame motif coming just up past her jawline.

I decided to go back to Baldur's Gate 3, started a new character, and apparently the theme of all of my RPG characters of late is "extremely large horned woman". 😅

screenshot gaming xbox baldur's gate 3

Posted on 26 November 2024, 19:47

A screenshot of my character in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. She's a Qunari, meaning she's tall, broad-shouldered and quite muscular, and has two massive horns that protrude from the sides of her head just above the temples. They curl back and under so they're pointing forwards, sort of like a goat. She has golden rings around them at various points, and has a neck tattoo that looks like a choker, along with another set of square geometric tattoos on her cheeks. Her skin is a dark blue/grey sort of colour, and she has a swath of hair that comes down from in between her horns and over the right side of her face. You can't tell from the angle in the screenshot but that same side of her head has long hair on it behind the horns, and the other side is shaved. In short, she will fuck you up if you look at her funny.

My favourite character in Dragon Age: Inquisition was my Qunari Mage, so I've gone for the same this time around in Veilguard! I love how she just radiates "I do not take any shit from anyone" energy.

(Also, yay fully-controllable photo mode in this game too! Seriously, all games should have that IMO.)

screenshot gaming xbox dragon age: the veilguard

Posted on 4 November 2024, 22:05

A screenshot from Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox, it's very wide-angle view of a huge wall of futuristic buildings with neon lights on them, many of them with Japanese writing on them. It's late afternoon so everything is a bit more orange than usual, and you can just see the shadows from the buildings behind starting to encroach on the ones in the screenshot.

Another screenshot, this one is far smaller in scope, it's night time and you're looking down an alley in between two brick buildings, with pipes running along them, grafitti on the walls, and steam coming up from the ground. There are some puddles on the ground reflecting the light.

Another screenshot, back to the wide angle view looking up but this one is closer to night time and it's inside the city with neon-lit buildings towering all around. There's some steam coming up from a couple of places here too.

Cyberpunk 2077 update: still absolutely enjoying the hell out of the atmosphere in this game.

And no spoilers so this is a bit vague, but you go to the funeral of a character and man, I was not expecting to get hit right in the feels by a video game.

screenshot gaming xbox cyberpunk 2077

Posted on 13 October 2024, 21:02