(Part 2) Best products from r/Gaming4Gamers

This afternoon: Torchlight II with Synergies Mod, farming those two final legendary set pieces in Derinkuyu.

Shortly after dinner, introducing a friend to Archer with the Archer drinking game. (I mean, it's a game, right?)

Finally, after dying from exactly one episode, we'll be having board game night with friends. I'm guessing we'll be playing Shadow Hunters with cards we made ourselves, but I'm hoping that we play something different, like Splendor or City of Thieves with draft picking.

Your best bet for learning yourself is to get a book. The biggest issue is their isn't really a generalized book. They are mostly specialized for exactly what you want to do. For example Michael Quinn's "Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP" is great if you want to wriate a parallel program in C with MPI and OpenMP. You would probably do pretty well getting Using OpenMP and going from there. It should have plenty of examples in C++ to get you started on th right track.

The two most interesting books I've read on video games have been Tristan Donovan's fascinating history of the medium, "Replay: The History of Video Games". It is a very in-depth history that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty stuff about the birth of video games and stays very in-depth up until about the late 90s when it starts to go big picture. Still a great read.

If you're looking for something that's more of a critical piece, I'd suggest Brendan Keogh's close reading of Spec Ops: The Line, "Killing is Harmless". It's an incredible way to enhance your playthrough of what is already an incredibly emotional game. Keogh breaks down everything from the allusions to literature and film to the significance of scripted events in the game. The only advice I have is if you haven't played the game before and you try and read along as you play the game you do get hit with some spoilers as Keogh assumes you've finished the game when you're reading the book. Still def worth your time though.

a few good games you could start with are, King of Toyko , or Pandemic, or Catan, or Betrayal at House ont he hill.

There is also a great youtube channel called Tabletop run by Wil Wheaton that showcases a ton of games where you can watch them play and get a feel ahead of time if its a game you think you would be interested in. http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/

This is a market where doing research really helps. Different switch colors types can feel wildly different with loud and heavy blue switches or lighter and quieter black ones or quick response reds. If you have never used one go to a best buy or microcenter or some other store with a display and try some options.

As far as specific recommendations $50 is roughly the bottom of the barrel you can get in without a truly terrible experience. This tecware is decent bang for the buck
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076YJM3V3/

realistically you looking at $100 or more for a board that feels premium like this HyperX Alloy favored by a lot of gamers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G2PY7KH/

I have a pair of Sennheiser G4me One. Most people recommend just getting a good pair of regular headphones and an attachable mic, but I was tired of having two wires getting tangled everywhere and wanted a full headset. I'm not an audiophile but I can tell the difference between shitty and good headphone sound, and these sound good. They're also comfortable, well-built, have a really nice volume knob and also just look sexy as hell. I recommend them if you don't mind splurging a bit.

This is the one I use. It has good sound and picks my voice up perfectly from a few feet away on my desk. Pretty affordable too.

I'm liking my Creative Fatal1ty headset, I'm hearing impaired so sound quality really doesn't affect me unless it's NOTICEABLY bad. I find this headset to be comfortable on my head and it works out pretty well. Also so I don't have to keep swapping between speaker and headset, I also purchased one of these to swap between the two with just a button press.

I didn't! Such a piece of garbage, as soon as I started using it everything was way harder and I found myself jumping all the time when I was trying to walk or dash... This is the one that lasted 20 minutes...

Once I got my hands on [these] (http://i.imgur.com/ICCos2M.jpg) I immediately felt like I had more control. There are also [ones] (http://www.amazon.com/Qanba-Q4-Q4RAF-Black-Fightstick/dp/B007SGGLZW) that work with both consoles with the same buttons and joysticks.

Though the whole "next-gen" thing kinda makes it look like you're wasting a lot of cash for an antiquated console(I have [2 agetec fight sticks] (http://i.imgur.com/N4IiSLI.jpg) for the dreamcast as well) I read somewhere that like the people behind Skullgirls made a driver for the ps4 so ps3 fightsticks would work on it.

They ALL work on PC so MAME and stuff like that becomes just that much more awesome.

Not a very popular book, but I would pick Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Half the book takes place inside of a computer game that is eerily similar to Second Life (eerily because the book came out in the late '80s), with a lot of action packed scenes in both the computer game and the "real life" bits. So it would kind of play like, "Yo, dawg, I heard you like video games so I put a video game inside a video game so you can play a video game while you play a video game".

Would you recommend these? Because I've been looking for a new headset after using my current one, (Turtle Beach X12's) for about 5 or 6 years now. I was really wanting to get this Steel Series Headset. I'm almost purely a PC gamer, and only use my console for singleplayer games now. Any suggestions? I really would like one that has the same durability that this turtle beach X12 headset has that I use currently, while being a little bit more comfortable.

Honestly the mini NES isn't much different than the Atari Flashback although $60 for the mini NES is pretty expensive for hardware that just needs to be powerful enough to run 30 year old software yet be able to output digitally via HDMI. The Atari Flashback is $40, comes with two joysticks, and has 100 games.