Few single player games off the backlog recently.  I played through Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which were both quite enjoyable romps.  With one of the early Uncharted 4 levels being an underwater level, I was fully expecting some shark action, but I’m happy to say that this turned out to be an unwarranted fear.

Of the two, I think I enjoyed The Lost Legacy more.  Uncharted 4 was a little too… grounded?  Apart from a very cool bit where you’re climbing around the insides of a giant clock, it really didn’t have any huge and improbable machines to clamber all over, while Lost Legacy had several.  It also had a LOT of combat, which is my least favorite part in any of the games.

On the plus side, it had a waterfall with a cave behind it, and there was something to pick up in the cave, so that’s one of my pet peeves with the series taken care of.

Both looked spectacular on the PS4 Pro.

Between those two, I spent a couple of fun nights playing though Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, which is widely considered to be too short and too easy.

I am rubbish at platform games. so neither adjective applies.  I lost count of the number of times I died trying to navigate a particular bit with disappearing platforms, but it was a very large number.  Bosses were easy, anyway, and I wound up stubbornly brute-forcing my way to 100% completion after about 8 hours of falling off things.

But getting games off the backlog isn’t nearly as fun as my latest flirtation with insanity.

A few months back, I bought a new graphics card.  It came with a Uplay key for – I am only going to use the full name once – “Tom Clancy’s The Division 2″, which was a welcome pack-in inasmuch as I’d played the heck out of the first The Division.

After playing through two games involving lots of waist-high walls and shooting mans and not enjoying it, I figured that a game involving waist-high walls and shooting mans that I WOULD enjoy was a good plan, so I went to start it.

…on my PC monitor.  Which is a not awful 24″ monitor, but which felt kind of constricted after playing through several console games while sitting entirely too close to a 42” screen.

But, you know, the PC is pretty close to the TV so all I need is a longer HDMI cable and I’m in business, right?  I eyeballed the distance and figured that I needed one about 9 feet long.

I went through my cable bins. I have a lot of cables. I turned out to have 8 spare HDMI cables, all of them between 6 feet and 2 meters in length.

I fumed.

Then I started thinking.  The PC monitor I use is a 1920×1200 monitor.  I happen to have two 1600×1200 monitors around.  I bought a new video card recently, maybe I can put all of these together and see what happens?

FOR THE RECORD:

1. The color isn’t quite right.  I tweaked it a bit after taking this photo and the monitors are a lot closer to a consistent color tone, but the middle is still just a touch more red.  All three of these screens are at least a decade old so I am not expecting miracles.
2. Diagonal lines that go between monitors don’t match up.  It’s a combination of the monitor bezels and the side monitors having slightly shorter screens.
3. Getting all three monitors going at once was an exercise in frustration.  I could get two working consistently and the third would flash in and out.  The trick, eventually, was realizing that I needed to go into the BIOS and disable the CPU’s integrated graphics chipset.
4. None of the above matter because it turns out that playing The Division 2 in 5120×1200 resolution is practically a religious experience.

I have never quite understood the lengths that a certain subset of PC gamers will go to in order to get their ultrawide setups working.  This has… changed me.

And all because I couldn’t find a longer HDMI cable.