My First Hours With Black Ops 6

The newest game in Call of Duty series, Black Ops 6, has been released exactly one week ago. I have spent a total of four hours playing this first-person-shooter. I am playing it with Xbox Seiries X. It did take some time for the game to be delivered as I wanted a physical copy of the game. It would have been possible to order it in advance as I know lots of us gamers actrually did. I got this in a very cheap price of 55 euros with shipping included. I could have supported a smaller local game shop but instead I went for the lower price this time. I think I saved 20 euros.

After spending some hours playing I checked as I was curious about what other gamers think about the game what was the score for Black Ops 6 in Metacritic. It didn’t come as much of a surprise that it had an average score of 85 out of 100 at the moment that I checked. I am very glad that the game wasn’t a huge flop. We have seen some games that have not proved their worth in the eyes of a true video game player.

Call of Duty is a video game series that has already a strong legacy. The first Call of Duty was released in 2003. It was actually 2006 when I first played this game. I was in a moment in my life that playing some video games started to become again a reality for me. I played it with my original Xbox. I have always liked very much of the experience that Call of Duty offers. I soon also completed the first Call of Duty as I did spend many hours playing it and also continued to play Call of Duty 2.

The other day I had a short conversation about Call of Duty with a connection or should I say a friend of mine. I had shared a photo of every Call of Duty game that had been released. The pile was huge and consisted of 24, or was there even 25 games because there was also one PS Vita game, titles. My friend actually asked how many of these have I completed. I made some calculations and came to a conclusion that I have played through only six out of 24 CoD games. This gives me some edge to write about the game series while I have to say that I have some more games to play also.

What bad there is to say about Black Ops 6? I don’t have,  at least currently, anything to complain about. I think I am almost half way through the game since it takes, according to my information, about 8 hours to finish the game. I like the feel of my game pad. I couldn’t imagine playing actually any FPS with a mouse and a keyboard but I think that is possible. My experiences of this controlling method seem to be minor but I have to say that I have played at least the first CoD in this way.

The plot might not be the most interesting matter when it comes to this game. Of course like fans have come to know there are these political matters that really deepen the way that a soldier in a battle has to come think about his or her view of the world. I think these themes have become a bit stronger when it comes to Black Ops games in Call of Duty series. So, there is a plot but I don’t think that it would fit a game like this. It is a game where you shoot and move and also where the gameplay is filled with quick responses and constant action. That is everything I like about this game. I am continuing to play the game as soon as possible.

All Original Xbox Games I Own That Are Playable On Series X

I have exactly only nine original Xbox games that are backwards compatible with my Xbox Series X. There are only 63 games in total out of every almost 1000 Xbox games that are backwards compatible. These games that I own are Black, Manhunt, Dead or Alive 3, Dead to Rights, Max Payne 1 and 2, Oddworld Munch’s Oddysee, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Full Spectrum Warrior.

The fact that you can play these games with a modern hardware seems amazing to me. Owning a working original Xbox would be another way to get to play these games. The controller of modern Xbox just feels much better than the original Xbox’s controller. You don’t have to concern yourself with poor video output quality or a need to use an adapter to get an HDMI out of your gaming console. The poor quality of original Xbox’s can lead you to buy many Xbox consoles if you aren’t able to repair them by yourself. But what kind of a gaming console would last over twenty years and still work? After all the device would need some maintenance.

Now I have tens, maybe even over a hundred, original Xbox games. I have had to move some of them to storage as I have had issues with consoles getting to malfunction. I have a broken original Xbox and also a Xbox 360. The issue with my Xbox might have had something to do with a broken condenser. These things can start to leak and cause some internal damage. The symptoms were that the console wouldn’t turn off. I had to unplug the power cord just to shut down the console. Otherwise it worked fine. The problem I had with my Xbox 360 was that it didn’t read any game discs no more. This was caused by some dust that had gotten into the console. I tried to solve the issue with compressed air but didn’t eventually succeed.

Over twenty years old gaming console can have many different issues. These devices aren’t actually today made to last tens of years. I don’t think that software developers and manufacturers of electronics were really thinking in the future for such a long period. This is somewhat understandable. Today there is this scene of old games that can inspire you in many ways if you just find yourself spending some time with them. After all there are so many games and so many systems to explore. This richness should be truly acknowledged.

Xbox Series X supports many Xbox 360 games also. There are 632 games out of a total of 2155 games that are playable. What happens when we move always to more modern consoles? Are we forgetting our past? Although the original Xbox can be emulated it seems today to be a difficult task while we are already seeing emulators that you can play Xbox 360 games with on our PCs. My current PC system just isn’t powerful enough to operate an emulator of this kind. The emulators name is Xenia.

Latest New Games That I Added to My Collection

So, this is a blog post about latest new games that I added to my collection of video games. I got these for cheap prices. I bought Lords of the Fallen and Dying Light 2 for Xbox Series X and Batman – Arkham Knight for PS4. I am not going to go so close to how much these games did cost. I am such a person that values a cheap price. I often find myself thinkinh about a game if its in a very good sale.

As you might see I haven’t yet opened the seal of Dying Light 2 and Batman – Arkham Knight. Sometimes unopened games can have a better selling price if you are selling them to someone after many years. However I am not planning to sell these. I am going to play these two games when I have time.

The game that I have played for about four hours is Lords of the Fallen. It is an action role-playing-game with smooth looking 3D environment. The camera is positioned as a 3rd person view. Gameplay is versatile and I think after playing already four hours I still haven’t managed to get a full grip of all of the controls and features that it offers. This is a very nice game and I hope to be able to play it some more later.

I have recently bought many retro games. It is also nice to buy new games for alternation. I am lucky as my PS4 seems to be working. I wonder if it’s going to break and I think some day it actually will. I hope it would last for many years. I’ve had a bad luck with my original Xbox and PS2 consoles and I found that they are not so durable after all these years. It has to be mentioned that these devices are over twenty years old. I wonder also if they have such a good quality after all. Maybe newer consoles last better in frequent use. At least I hope they do.

Dying Light 2 has had some reviews that have been positive. Everyone just doesn’t consider it to be a good game at all. I have played the first Dying Light game and I didn’t enjoy it so much. I stumbled on this copy of the sequel and since it was sold at half price I thought I could buy it after all.

Batman – Arkham Knight for PS4 was sold at a price of twenty euros. It is a re-release as PlayStation Hits. If a game gets re-released it propably tells you something about how it has managed to get an audience and how well it has sold. I think this one can be also a very good game to play. It is a bit older game (but not a retro game, at least yet).

All-in-all I am content in these new games that I have bought. I like to buy games that I like and am able to play. My collection keeps slowly growing. I like to keep games that I have bought in my collection even if I have already completed them. Some games I store in my gaming shelf and some games I have to put in to separate storage that I have. So I have some consoles and games positioned nicely for the collection to be visible also to some friends that come to visit our home.

Some Good Xbox 360 Games That Can Be Played on Xbox Series X

In this blog post I introduce to you some Xbox 360 games that can be played on a Xbox Series X. As you might have noticed there are plenty of used Xbox 360 games available. This might be a good time to buy some of these games. They don’t cost so much.

Now, every Xbox 360 game is not compatible with the latest Xbox which of course is at least at the moment Xbox Series X. There are many games available as a digital copy. They also don’t cost too much. So, if you prefer digital just go ahead and get maybe some of these five titles that I have in this featured image of this blog post.

I don’t like to buy games that I can’t play. That is why I have removed some Xboc 360 games that aren’t compatible with Xbox Series X from my gaming shelf. How do you know which games are supported? I use this list that is featured on Wikipedia. Just make a search with your favorite search engine with the words: “xbox 360 games compatible with xbox series x” or something similar and you will find the list. It holds currently 633 games out of every 2155 games that were ever released for Xbox 360.

So, when I am browsing a list of some game shops Xbox 360 titles available on-line I go and check every time I come across an interesting game. I check if the game is compatible or not. Since this list is ordered alphabetically it is very easy to check if the game is actually compatible.

These games don’t cost so much. Xbox 360 was released back in 2005 so these games are not the newest ones out there. They actually aren’t retro games also. They seem to be these very good games that are beginning to get old and might be forgotten somewhere in the near future. So, it must be important to just remember how good games they actually were. Who is there to stop you from playing them?

Another fact about these games is that they don’t take a whole lot of disk space. You can install a game and it takes only about 10 GB of space from your gaming console. There are hundreds of games like these available. So, what games should you choose?

Here in this picture I have five games that have been very popular. These aren’t hard to find. There are plenty of copies available that you can buy from a gaming shop that you like to buy games from. Here in this image I have Gears of War, Alan Wake, Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption and Bully – Scholarship Edition.

Now I can remember that I didn’t pay above 15 euros of any of these games. These are all popular and very good games. I encourage you to check the prices from your local game shop or maybe from some online game store. I once bought maybe ten or fifteen games as a bunch since there was a nice discount for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. And you must remember also that some original Xbox games are also comaptible with Xbox Series X.

So, there you have it. This small set of games might just be what you could be palying next on your Xbox Series X or maybe also on Xbox Series S as a digital copy. These games are cheap. They are not remakes. They are not new games. They are just something that you might want to own in a near future.

Returning to Halo In The Form of Master Chief Collection

It’s been some years that I played the first Halo game. It was probably on Xbox 360 but I can clearly remember when I got my first touches to this game on original Xbox. The year must have been 2006. The first Halo was released for PC also. I have it as a physical copy that I managed to buy from re-use center only a few years back. I also have Master Chief Collection on PC. I bought it through Steam and it was clearly on some kind of sale when I bought it.

What it comes to Master Chief Collection for Xbox Series X I can tell you that I only recently bought it. Yes, it was the time of this years Black Friday. So, I did buy something on this years Black Friday. I am not so big fan of this event or season or whatever you call it. I think this has become too important for everyone of us. Well, maybe I have to just adjust to the situation. Let me just tell you that it is ridiculous how much people buy stuff during this time of year. And you know that the amount of stuff you have in your  apartment has been increasing. This has happened, I think, in overall in almost every apartment.

Halo was released in 2001. It was a remarkable game. It wasn’t the first first person shooter that we got for a game console. What it was was surely one of the first games that successfully and finally brought FPS games steadily to also consoles. Before this we really couldn’t play games like this with a game pad. The first FPS of this kind must have been Golden Eye for Nintendo 64 and it was released in 1997. This was the beginning of the era when you wouldn’t necessarily need a mouse and a keyboard to play these types of games that were strongly categorized as games for only PC.

The first Halo offered tight shooting action. The controls were smooth. The crosshair was a bit larger than it had been on some earlier games of this genre. The game was set in some kind of a futuristic and fantasy type of environment. The world of this game looks and feels beautiful. Since this is a remaster of the original game the graphics have been improved. The latest Xbox controller also improves the average gameplay a lot.

I have completed 70 percentage of the game. By this I mean only of the first game – Halo: Combat Evolved. The collection comes with every Halo game that was released before and including Halo 4. I bought the collection when I realized that the only Halo I have completed was Halo 3. I paid only about 25 euros for this collection. It gives you a good value. Since I got my Xbox Series X and removed Series S from my current setup I have bought many games as physical copies.

I have to tell you that I had a slight issue with installing the game. The menus appeared in Korean. I had to make a search for some guidance and finally found some video that showed me how to change the language to English. The game didn’t seem to offer an option for selecting the language to Finnish. But that’s OK for me. I don’t like to hear or read Finnish from a game and since I read and write also very good English it doesn’t matter to me at least so much.

Spending Some Time With Forza Motorsport

Forza Motorsport was released almost two weeks ago. I was a bit sceptic towards it but decided finally to purchase it. As I have spent some hours already playing it I think it isn’t a total disappointment as a racing game. I think it is actually a very nice game.

This is the first Forza Motorsport for this console generation. We have of course seen games of this series been released and playable with Series S/X consoles through backwards compatibility. I am talking about games that were released originally for Xbox One.

I am a huge racing game fan. What I am not so inspired of are Forza Motorsport games. I get the point that Microsoft wanted to create this series of racing games to compete with Sony and their Gran Turismo series. I think GT is a bit better when it somes to a comparison. I especially have enjoyed the first GT, the fourth and, latest, seventh.

I am also waiting for the new WRC game. It sohuld be in our faovrite game shops 3th of November this year. I am not going to get this game in advance since there is always some problems with the delivery. This doesn’t mean that the game shop has done something wrong. I just can not believe that the game would be delivered in time of its release. Maybe I’ll get a digital copy, who knows?

EA Sports WRC has currently a price tag of 50 euros and it will be released for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. We are not getting a release for Switch this time. I am not surprised. Switch does lack some power that it would need for hnadling this kind of a game. So far the reviews have been mainly positive.

So, lets make a conclusion right here. We have a new Forza Motorsport game currently in our hands. It is a decent racing game and provides some fun racing gaming times. The price tag was 70 euros. I think the price is a bit high. It doesn’t make it sound any better that the price of the digital version is same. If you are into racing game you might want to pick this up. If you are tight on your budget you might want to save some money for the upcoming WRC game and maybe you want to buy this game after its price is getting lowered a bit sometime in the near future.

This game isn’t percfect but it stands as a decent new sequel to this very legendary racing game series. I think that’s it for this blog post. Thank you once again for reading. You are the ones that I am making this content for. Do, please, remember that. And keep reading the blog!

Xbox Series X Has a Nice Backwards Compatibility (But Far From Full)

My Xbox 360 has been suffering. It doesn’t read game discs anymore. Otherwise it is fully functional. I tried opening it a bit through the disc unit as was insturcted on an official guideline I found from internet. I read from the guide that you should first power the device off, remove all cables and then try to push the wheel of the disc unit so that it opens up a bit. This was instructed to do with paper clip that has been straightened. Then you should bloww some compressed air to it.

I did mangae to do this and it fixed the problem. I was able to start a game once again. Then some weeks went by. I wasn’t playing anything with my Xbox 360. I played my other game conmsoles. As you might know Xbox 360 has a backwards compatiblity with original Xbox games. 463 games out of all 996 published are backwards compatible. We can make a quick calculation and find out that this makes 46,5 % of all games that were published for original Xbox.

If you think about PS3 and PS4 and their backwards compatibility you can propably figure how differently Microsoft and Sony deal with this issue. PS4 wasn’t at any moment backwards compatible at all. This pissed off some people. You were able to play PS1 games on PS3. Some PS3 models you are able to play also PS2 games with. PS5 however has limited backwards compatibility for PS4 games.

Xbox Series X, the latest Xbox, is fully compatible with older Xbox consoles’s games. However every game is not supported. There are 63 original Xbox games out of 996 and 633 out of 2155 Xbox 360 games compatible with the latest Xbox console. Xbox Series S doesn’t even have a disc drive so apparently it doesn’t support older consoles’s game discs. All Xbox One games are compatible with Series X.

With this information available I decided to remove my oddly acting Xbox 360 from my current setup. This meant actually that I had to remove also tens of games from my lineup. I like to keep every game that I am able to play with any console in my setup in this huge shelf. I had to remove many Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

I have now only six original Xbox games left in that shelf. The picture related to this post shows my current games that I am able to play with my Xbox Series X. I didn’t count the games that I removed so carefully. I think I set aside maybe 70 games in total. I had to put games like Halo 1 and 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 and many others to storage. These were games that I haven’t had time to get into thoroughly.

I would like to be able to play every game that has ever been released for any Xbox system. This is just the way that things go. You are updating your setup and getting into some new or retro consoles. You don’t actually play every game that you own. Some games and systems you just have to set aside at least for a while. Xbox 360 is an old gaming console. It was first released in 2005. I bought my Xbox 360 as a used copy. This was about six years ago. So maybe it was time for me to move on.

Games do get old. Systems do get old. There are many games that you just can’t play, buy or enjoy in any way no more. I think there should be something that could be done to this issue of great games just disappearing somewhere. We seem to be still moving so fast forward that we can easily completely forget a nice old game.

I don’t know the exact answer to this question. Will there be in the future some websites or collectins of old games. Are we going to be able to finally play these games with an emulator? Would it be nice to have a museum that could hold many old games? I know that there are already some websites that are dedicated to old Commodre 64 games. They have archived thousands of games which are also available as downloads.

There cetainly is some knowledge about gaming that also I as a gamer have been able to develop in myself. From the moment when I first gazed at a video game in some arcade I have been curious to find out more about games. I went as far as studying the field. I dreamed I would be able to make a game or something similar. And I think I am not alone with my knowledge and I think this is an interesting topic all in all.

Nothing Special to See Here

This image here is a screenshot from Forza Horizon 5. I am playing it currently on my Xbox Series X. I bought it recently as a digital copy. It cost me about 40 euros. I was happy that I didn’t have to pay more for it. It isn’t the newest racing game after all.

I bought also some other games. I noticed that there are some Xbox 360 and original Xbox games available as digital copy and they were on a discount also. So, I picked up some more games. There were 9 games all in all. I picked up Red Faction II, The Darkness, Contra, Vampyr, Flashback, Call of Cthulhu, Crimson Skies – High Road to Revenge, FH5 and Gears of War 4. This cost me only about 75 euros. I saved over 100 euros. If you can call spending money saving money. Well, I think we can.

Some people are talking and even worrying about spending too much money buying gaming stuff. I don’t think gaming would be different from any other hobby that you have to spend money in. You need equipment in sports. You need money if you drive a car. How is gaming different? This talk about money makes me think about some of these big game releases. We can take the latest Zelda game for example. It is Tears of the Kingdom. I think they have a huge marketing budget. This is reality. It is so because I did saw a commercial on a bus stop just some weeks ago. I don’t remember seeing a game advertised on a bus stop here in a long period of time. If this has happened earlier, I don’t remember what the game might have been.

Forza Horizon 5 is already an old game. It isn’t actually old. Its just not the newest game providing racing and entertainment. I decided to start playing it because I hadn’t done it earlier. It has received some good ratings. It would take me at least 20 hours of time to finish it. Or so tells the well-known website named “How Long to Beat”. This is my preferred website if I want to seek information about how long does a game last. Some times, like in the case of Diablo II – Resurrected, I have noticed that it takes me some more time to complete a game than what is told on this website. If you want to see the website, just use your favorite search engine. As you might have noticed I don’t promote any special search engine.

I am hoping to enjoy some more Forza Horizon 5. I hope that I can finish it some day soon. I have spent already maybe 5 hours playing it. There is, as is usual today, many different areas of interest in this game. There’s a lot going on. We have definitely more than a racing game  here. I hope to continue playing it and to explore its content as thoroughly as is possible.

About Modern PC Controllers

This blog post deals with controllers for PC. I have used these three different gamepads for gaming on Windows 10. I don’t know, exactly, how these controllers work in Linux gaming. So, that part is out of the context of this post. Let’s get to it!

There are three, mainly, three controllers I have used. They are Sony Dualshock 4, the controller of PS4, Microsoft Elite Pad, that is designed for Xbox One and, my latest addition, PDP Neon Carbon that is used, mainly, with Xbox Series S/X. All these gamepads can be used with Windows 10.

Dualshock 4 (the red controller in the image) needs an app so it can be used. That app is DS4Windows. This gamepad works very well with PC. Only thing that is really annoying is the mapping of buttons. As I have learned by my experience, Windows apps tend to map controllers as Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X controllers. This is a bit irritating. I think this issue can be solved. There are for example USB dongles that can be used as a solution. As I noticed this problem I had a quick fix for it already – I changed to my oldest gamepad that is Elite Pad (the one in the middle in the image).

Buttons have been configured correctly when you are using Xbox One’s gamepad. It is often taken care that a controller that can be used in a Xbox Series console will be compatible with Windows also. I think you can even take a Xbox 360 controller and plug it in so you can use it to play with a PC.

By the way, all these controllers I have been using have had a wired connection. I haven’t even tried to get bluetooth to work with these. Why would I do that? My desktop doesn’t even have a bluetooth itself. I use a bluetooth dongle for a wireless connection whenever there is a need for such. It also seems that all these three controllers have a USB-to-micro-USB connection. Even the third gamepad, that is meant for new Series X, also sports a micro-USB, instead of the most popular, USB-C. This however makes only a little difference. And basically all you need is a cable that has about a metre or one and a half metres of lenght.

So, I was very involved in this and I was using the Elite Pad. It is of a very good quality. It was expensive and it has served well over ten years of use. After all, it started to break down a bit. There was a part, that I think was originally glued to its place, that I had to remove. It was sticking out and the controller didn’t fit so nicely anymore. I decided to get a newer controller. Of course my thoughts were to buy a controller of Xbox Series X. I had some thoughts about DualSense, but since Xbox and Windows go well together, I decided to go for the Xbox on this one.

It first seemed that the replaicment would definitely be a combo of wired and wireless. It would be an Xbox Series X controller. I first thought that I would buy the official controller. I made my way to a store. I found out that they were actually out of these controllers. I noticed an optional model. It actually was this PDP Xbox Series X controller.

The controller was only 45 euros or so. So it was 20 euros cheaper than the official controller. When it comes to gaming this kind of a swing can be a gamechanger. And that’s how it was for me in this situation. I got the gamepad and went home as a happy duude.

First thing I noticed with this controller was that it doesn’t have a battery included. It is a wired controller. It has a functionality and you can remove the cord. This might seem useless but it actually makes sense in a way. You can replace the cord if you are on the move or if it gets damaged in some way. It is very light. The feel is awesome. I like this controller and I haven’t noticed anything to complain about. It is compatible with Windows 10 and you don’t necessarily need any app to use it in this way. There is some sort of an app avvailable as a donwload.

We can have a tiny summary here out of this blog post. I am very content on my new controller. It is a nice update to my old Elite Pad. I have to say that Elite Pad really served very well for its price of 130 euros. It has an option to load a battery in it. It also has some adjustments and a bit of weight for the controller to feel good. It was although time to move on with it. You can also try to use PlayStation controllers with a PC. Some games might feel better this way. I didn’t go through Linux or Mac gaming in this blog post but as you can probably figure there is a wholea other world in that way also.

Some Thoughts After Beating Max Payne

I finally had time to beat Max Payne. This is the first game in the series which consists of three games. I don’t know yet if I am going to play Max Payne 2 – The Fall of Max Payne or if I am going to try to play the game all over again with an increased difficulty level. After you complete the game in one of two easier difficulty levels you unlock these harder difficulty levels. All difficulty levels from easy to hard are “Fugitive”, “Hard-Boiled”, “Dead on Arrival” and “New York Minute”.

There was a kind of a problem right at the end of this game. This was the only time I had to look for a clue from a walk through that I found online. Actually that walk through was a YouTube video. I am not going to spoil the ending in any way if you are also interested in this game. This game was released for multiple gaming systems including PC, Xbox and PS2. I am not sure if there are some other ports. I prefer Xbox version since it gives you a nice feel of controlling and you can also save anytime you want. In PS2 version of this game there is only an automatic saving that really pisses the player off many times as the game is saved in a situation that makes it impossible to continue playing. This feature has everything to do with the fact that PS2 doesn’t natively have a hard disk.

I completed the game in “Fugitive” mode. This is the easiest difficulty level. I found out that I didn’t remember all the details that were in the plot. The story is simple but it is fun to follow. The world that Max Payne is placed in is very realistic or naturalistic in a certain way that also describes some urban scenery. There are guns, violence and drugs as well as deep and even satanistic clubs in which the action takes place in this game.

The game is very enjoyable. There is lots of action. The game owes much of its success to action and sci-fi movies like those directed by John Woo and Matrix. You get to view the world from 3rd person view. There are plenty of weapons. Shotgun is a nice weapon but it is very slow to reload. Then there are two types of hand guns. There are also some sub machine guns, a sniper rifle, grenades and an automatic shotgun which is a very powerful weapon. There is a limited amount of ammo. You get to use pain killers to increase your level of health. You have also an option to slow down time. There are two ways. You can first activate this bullet time effect and move to any direction or you can jump to the side as the time slows down. This can be very effective and it gives you more time to aim.

Graphics are very nice. Sound acting is somewhat confident. If you think some games that have a low quality of voice acting, like the first Resident Evil released in 1996, Max Payne does a way better job. The fact that Max loses his family in the beginning of the game gives lots of motivation for the player to progress in the game. You are on a mission. You have to survive in a cold world.

I don’t want to give Max Payne a score. It was something revolutionary back in 2001 when it was released. Today it is still relevant as a video game. It was also the game that made Remedy Entertainment famous. If you are looking for a retro shooter that isn’t as realistic and serious as today’s ultra realistic shooting games you can definitely pick up Max Payne. I can definitely recommend it. There is also lots of replay value. I might even play it through again with increased difficulty level. And don’t forget that this game has also two sequels.

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