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Gaming

Review: Tales of Arise

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Note: This game has more typos and misspellings than it should, and I have included quite a few in this post. Some include characters you meet throughout the game, so those could be spoiler-ish. Also, the game allows you to customize the look of characters, hence why some have bunny ears, strange outfits, etc. They don’t normally look like that.

It’s been years since I’ve had as much fun with a role-playing game as I did with Tales of Arise. The game is not perfect, but it’s almost there.

This was my first experience with the Tales series, other than the anime adaptation of Tales of the Abyss. A friend of mine has recommended the series off and on over the years, but the desire to play it was never there.

The beginning hours of the story feels rather generic. Guy with amnesia meets angry girl who wants to topple some powerful rulers of the land who come from a different planet, Rena, and enslave the people of Dhana. But it does pick up, and it just keeps better and better and leads to things unexpected. When you get to the end and look back at the beginning, it feels almost like a completely different game.

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Gaming

What Extron can do for you

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Why matrix switchers are awesome… after the trouble of setting them up

In this post we’ll take a look at the two Extron matrix switches I purchase this year, the Crosspoint 450 Plus Series and Extron SMX Series Switcher, and why you may or may not want to add one to your setup.

Let’s say you’re like me and you have quite a few game systems you’d like to have all connected to your TV (or some other display device). The simplest option, but perhaps bothersome depending on your setup, is to swap out the A/V cables as needed.

Your NES is plugged in but you want to play SNES? Disconnect the NES and plug in the SNES. Want to now play your PlayStation 1? Same thing—disconnect the SNES and plug in the PS1.

If you only have a small selection of consoles, this might not be so much of a hassle. But if you have your display wall-mounted or in some other location where you can’t easily get to the inputs, you may find this challenging.

If you’re only working with composite video with RCA plugs (typically with yellow, white and red plugs), a basic RCA selector could work. Plug everything into that, and then that plugs into your display. Almost all of these are going to require you to get up and physically push a button the switch, but that’s not terrible.

My setup is a bit overkill. Click the picture for the full-size version.

But let’s say you have a lot of consoles. Five? Eight? Ten? Twelve? More??? You’re going to need to connect several switchers to each other, and that can get a little confusing.

What if you’re using a higher quality video signal, such as S-video, component or RGB? HDMI? How about a mix of any of those cables? Are you splitting the video to two or more displays at once? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a consumer option that fits your needs.

Enter the Extron line of video switchers.

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