Disgaea PC, Rocket League, and related things

So, over 3 months since my last post?  Best get back into it by writing about what I know - games!

First, the catch-up bits... I know I mentioned Rocket League in passing, as part of my Steam Link and Steam Controller write-up, but that's hardly sufficient at this point.  First off, the Steam Link has improved with the addition of hardware video encoding support for all the major graphics manufacturers, all but eliminating the lag I reported on earlier.  Past that, though, Rocket League is so much fun that, having gotten it for free as part of my Steam Link purchase, I ponied up the cash for it when it launched on the XBox One, for the better-for-the-task controller and my social circle there.  If you don't know anything about it, think "spastic monkey rocket jump car soccer", and you'll be pretty close.  It's not a deep game, but it is a load of fun, and I heartily recommend it.

On the other hand, there's Disgaea PC, a port of a port of an old PlayStation 2 game.  I'm a fan of the series, and would desperately like all of them brought to PC.  When I saw the news that the first one was slated to come out, I was thrilled... but then, I saw the push for pre-orders, and got that sinking feeling.  Launch day came yesterday, and, as I feared, the reports started pouring in of weird performance issues from all corners... but, initial reports seemed to indicate that it was mostly people with nVidia graphics cards seeing the worst problems (I have an AMD card), and the producers were quick to accept that there were issues they missed in testing and promising to get things fixed.  So, I paid my dues, took my spin of the wheel, and... well, as-is, it seems to be playable, so long as I turn off anything "improved" from the original version, and for my definition of playable (it's slower than it should be, but not intolerably slow).  I wish I could tell everyone to go and get it right now... but, I just can't.  Hopefully, the developers work out the kinks, and this is just a momentary stumble on the road to getting good, working copies of all the games on PC.

Update:  Wow, the Disgaea folks (Nippon Ichi Software America, or NISA) are taking care of business like no other company that I can think of in recent history.  Two patches later in the course of a week or so, and the game's gone from "barely playable" to "working mostly as intended, with a glitch or two".  Hopefully, NISA has learned the value of a beta or early access stage to their PC releases from this little debacle, but it looks like they're well on their way to cleaning up this mess, at least.  As for the game itself, I'd say it's worth buying at this point... my main issues with it at this point are design choices that later games in the series improved on, but it's still a nice little game itself.