Got M'self a Sweet-Ass New TV

I've been in the market for a new TV for about two years, now - my trusty old LG 50-inch 1080 plasma was just getting a little long in the tooth.  It would get these... I don't know what to call it, like "power twitches" where the whole screen would flash and lose color for a second, which would usually fade as the thing warmed up.  It wasn't a big deal, and for years I bristled against Chamberlain's insistence that 4K is actually kind of awesome.  I couldn't imagine needing more than one thousand and eighty Pees.  

Then I spent frankly too much on a new PC.  My PC was in desperate need of replacement, but I went overboard.  Spent like 3.5K on a monstrous PC I'll honestly use like 10% of, because it's here for blogging and YouTube and, lately, more than a bit of Griftlands and Hades early access - but at least it's muscly enough to be a confident little workstation for, I dunno, maybe the next decade or so?  

Part of the new PC is a 27 or 30-inch 4K LED monitor.  Its colors are a little flat, but its resolution is certainly impressive.  Though, again, I'm not usually sure I need that many Ps.  As a rule, my PC is set to output at 1080p because I don't like the way some things get resized in 4K in Windows, but when the Ghost of Tsushima trailer came out with a 4K60 version on YouTube, I went into my settings and told Windows to run at 4K, and ran the video.  

Then I told Chamberlain and Alex that I'm gonna' need myself a 4K TV before this game drops.  

I don't think I ever wrote about this, but I have a Fantasy Game.  That is, there's this game I have in my head that's never been made.  My game is not called Ghost of Tsushima, it's called Five Body Blade, but there are a lot of similarities, here. 

Five Body Blade is a triple-A western-produced open-world action-adventure with stealth elements, set in feudal-era Japan.  Your starting quest would depend on your honorable or dishonorable reaction to the game's opening moments, but from there you can either follow the quests or just set out into swashbuckling ancient Japan, rolling into town (on foot - a horse would come later) like Kane in Kung-Fu, bringing nameless justice to those suffering under the heels of cruel men and women in power.  

It would be very CD Projekt Red in that every narrative branches, yadda yadda yadda, and would have a deep, stylish, awesome combat system.  Another thing I thought would be cool is if like, your Samurai gets an arm cut off or something, they're obliged to go learn a one-armed sword style?  Wouldn't that be cool?  

It would be called Five Body Blade because they used to test the quality of a sword by stacking the bodies of deceased criminals on top of each other, and taking a swing at them.  Only the very best swords could cleanly cut through five fucking torsos, so that just... felt like a cool title.  

So that game doesn't exist.  It's The Game I Want and have wanted for... well ever since I played both Way of the Samurai and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I guess.  And the closest I've ever seen to it is coming out in about two weeks, from Sony's first-party studio and the makers of Sly Cooper and inFamous, and it's called Ghost of Tsushima.  It's not as perversely violent as mine (or, for example, The Last of Us Part II), but it's so much of what I want.  

• Samurai Game
• Third-Person
• Triple-A
• Western Developer (idk why, but that's honestly part of my 5BB criteria)
• Open World
• Stealth Elements

Yyyyyyeeeeeeeeaaaah.  A friend told me to look at TV prices at Costco, and I was surprised to find nicely-sized 4K TVs for around a thousand bucks.  Perhaps, now, it was finally time to enter the 4K fray.  I poked around but didn't find anything that was both 4K and had HDR and could do 120HZ and didn't have shitty, washed-out colors.  What I needed was a lot more than a grand, I guess, but I kept on poking around and came across a Samsung. 

It's all of those things, and received an "excellent" rating from displaylag.cog.  I always forget that displaylag.cog exists, and every time I buy a new TV I email its specs to Chamberlain and ask what he thinks. 

Then, Chamberlain goes to displaylag.cog, looks it up for me, and tells me the answer.  This TV is 4K with HDR and 120 HZ and excellent colors and apparently it's excellent for gamers.  It's not a top-of-the-line anything.  I'm pretty sure the Q60R is Samsung's like entry-level premium from 2019.  Even in 2019, there were better 4Ks than this, but its colors super-pop and yesterday - after spending literally half the day moving furniture around my house, working up a sweat that absolutely obliterated the good work my morning shower had done - I set it up and ran it through its paces.  

It took several game tests to realize that I need to go into the options of like, every game I own and turn the brightness down.  I also discovered that using HDR absolutely destroys any captures you may make during the game (the capture is the HDR signal, so everything looks both way too bright and way too dark at the same time, but on the TV itself it looks lovely).  

At Chamberlain's suggestion I started with Insomniac's Spider-Man, but somehow the TV's refresh rate makes Spidey's animations look less fluid.  I don't know how else to describe it - just the teensiest bit of ghosting I didn't get on my plasma.  Oh well.  

I don't understand why it should be the case at all.  The thing apparently runs at 120HZ, 120 frames per second, and it automatically switches to Game Mode when it detects the PS4 is sending a signal - why on earth should there be any ghosting like that?  Oh welly. 

Control has frame rate issues.  Also a lot of fun.

Next up was Remedy's Control.  I dunno why, I was just in the mood to play it.  Control's resolution doesn't take advantage of the TV at all, but after watching Color Out of Space, for some reason, I absolutely love blowing away inter-dimensional horrors that explode in a wash of impossible colors that bleed across the screen and fade.  It's absolutely gorgeous on the big screen.  

Oh I should mention it's a very large TV.  Like, too big.  Like, probably a mistake for the size of the room I'm using it in, but after several years of playing Overwatch in VR and thus effectively on a 200 foot screen hovering in space in front of me, it's pretty cool.  Watching movies on it is awesome so far. 

After that, I put on Horizon: Zero Dawn and completed a quest. Horizon became the immediate frontrunner for Graphical Awesomeness on the new TV - it's... staggering, frankly - but then I turned on The Last of Us Part II and cleared an area of enemy combatants.  

And yeah.  The Last of Us Part II is just the best-looking video game, period.  But then it put me into a story sequence, so I turned that off and went back to Control.  

I just love the structure of Control.  This huge open honeycomb maze of a world with all these little quests and such to do - and playing it made me wish I could get the exploration, survival, stealth combat gameplay (and presentation) of TLOU2, with the pure-gameplay and occasional-story structure of Control.  

TLoU2, for me, is too much story getting in the way of all my excellent gameplay.  If I want a story I'll watch a movie, but I think my reaction to Hide and Seek will make a fine blog post for tomorrow.  

Oh I also watched The Dead Don't Die.  It was fun for the first half hour.  Don't watch that.