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I have finished City of Springs and it was not horrible. While it is as engaging as Assassin's Creed without parkour (one can try to parkour and fall through the level geometry), it is functional. The story follows a young unemployed engineer in a steampunk/post-apocalyptic city after the local government executes the engineer's sister. The stealth is functional and the combat is unusual, for what it's worth. The unusual part is that there are 2 lines and you can summon small drones, so can your oppponent. The goal is to destroy the opponent (bug-like robots). It vaguely reminds of DotA/MOBAs in general, but not quite it. And the opponents have slightly different shells - the starting ones are white, then the stronger ones are purple, and the late-game ones are golden and grey. And their shells have no bearing on their abilities beyond the health bar. The bosses have a slightly fancier shells with decorations on them and do require attention. The visual and sound design are present. Again, they are not the worst I have seen, but I generally struggled to notice the interactive objects without the highlight (looking for 3 "machines" in one of the missions was decidedly unfun). The VA is there and line skipping was skipping 2 at a time, thus, somewhere from mid-game I was getting about 50% of the dialogues because listening to it was not exactly engaging. The journal consisted of "Talk to [NPC]. There might be jobs to do" and put markers on the next objective. The controls are not rebindable, the game autosaves in 5 slots. There are some side quests most of which I've skipped. I suppose, "it works" is not the best recommendation, but given the price I had expected crashes or game-breaking bugs and there were none (I had to reload after getting stuck once), and the story was concluded at the end.

Still nothing new in october I hope it will be fixed soon

Best examples for that are Pillars 1 and inXile's Torment, imo. Both (Torment worse than Pillars1) have a lot of dialog that is terribly overwritten and just horrible to read. And I don't even mean the baker characters. Especially Torment went way over board with descriptive text... You'll just end up skipping all of that after a couple hours. Though I'm not really blaming them - back then we all still thought that lots of text means good RPG. I blame Planescape: Torment for that, lol. Once those games were out and I've learned that a lot of text doesn't mean that it's good, I started to really appreciate Fo1's writing again. It's short, to the point, and never wastes your time. Very nice.

Fat Shady just got a little shadier... "Trump says he has commuted sentence of former US Rep. George Santos in fraud case" They say that people usually get the government they deserve. I suppose we had this coming.

The irony of something like the first two Baldur's Gate games is that they were obviously a product of many, many compromises that the developers probably would've rather not have made if they didn't have to...but some of those compromises were the exact thing that I now realize I want out of a video game. Textual density and voice-acting is just exactly one such thing: the ability to be selective about what is voice-acted versus what is not, making it so that text is generally tight but you can have longer passages when the situation calls for it...and you didn't make the player constantly listen to or make the decision to skip past voice-acting because it's taking way too long when it's really not that good or for anything very important, but contrarily you can have entire conversations voice-acted if it is actually an important story moment or particularly silly or for any other reason you'd like...and it's not like the Baldur's Gate games did any of this perfectly either, there was a lot of room for improvement in many areas that didn't mean either going full book mode OR making every last bit of dialogue voice-acted. I don't want games that are endlessly text-dense (unless it's actually REALLY well-written or intriguing, but the rate of games successfully sinking their claws into you so much that you genuinely want to explore every last nook and cranny, listen to every last character dialogue, go through the full lore descriptions of each item just for the joy of the writing is really low), but I don't want games to be total basic garbage, either. There's a balance to be struck with these things, and it seems like a lot of games really struggle to find that balance and meaningfully carve out their identities within it.

For me, it's a matter of mental energy and choosing when I want to engage with something. Notifications, updates, ads...but also new videos from people I like, if a webcomic I'm following updates, game launchers/wrappers telling me a friend is playing a game or whatever, et cetera. I generally want as little as possible that's not actually important imposing itself on me, and stuff that is always online has a way of doing just that...constantly, every day, and while some people are fine with that, maybe even thrive on being constantly connected to everything, I find too much stimuli or too much asking something from me to be an unnecessary drain of my energy. My Windows 10 format is "disconnected": all the built-in ads are disabled, Windows does not push any notifications to me, it does not even automatically update, nothing about it ever changes unless I personally effect that change. I can to tell it to update, which I do every once in a while...and that's the key thing: when I tell it to. I'm prepared for it when I decide to do that and I want pretty much everything else to be the same: if I choose to open up YouTube, I do so with the knowledge (perhaps even desire!) that there might be new videos from the people I'm subscribed to...the same for checking my email, the same for how I pretty much always have my phone set on silence except for a very few people, the same for when I choose to visit the Obsidian forums. I have a need for controlling when I choose to engage with stuff, and I utterly loathe it when that control is taken away from me. I accept not having that control when it comes to family, pets, and some close friends, but not a lot else...certainly not my operating system or any of my devices: thus, I want most everything to be disconnected and manual activation only, and the whole always online paradigm and everything wanting to be connected to you and have all these different avenues of annoying you in some way is really anathema to that.

So, New Arc Line has about a dozen hours of content in Early Access. I had hoped for more. I tried a Voodoo Shaman to see the difference between tech and magic. Gameplay wise, tech characters gain abilities through their equipment. Every weapon has the attacks it allows the character to perform. Backpacks and other equipment may give other abilities - boots crafted for Steam Engineers for example give a rocket jump and a charge ability. Mage characters on the other hand craft additional spells and gain their abilities that way. There is a magic corruption system that isn't completely implemented yet. If the spells cast by a mage are more powerful than the regions magic level, the mage slowly gets corrupted and will gain mutations at certain thresholds. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Story wise, some npcs don't like you as much depending on your class. Some quests may have more objectives. During the main quest a mage player gets offered an alternate quest at some stage - it still links back into the next main quest just as if you had done the normal quest, but it offers a choice and that is nice. The game has some potential. All the devs need is for the war to stop so they can develop in peace.

I enjoyed that John Candy doc as well. The other doc I watched recently was My Mom Jayne, which is Mariska Hargitay's investigation into her mom. It was phenomenal. I expected a nice feel good story about Mariska learning about her mom who died when she was only 3. But instead I got this incredibly complex family story filled with all sorts of revelations. It was really just jaw droppingly good. I knew very little about the whole story, but it was super engaging.

I was going to say there is this product called headphones, but I suppose that wouldn't be great if working/having to keep half an ear on something else at times. But at home/late night. I know in some cases, if one has bad tinnitus (as example), that headphones can be bad, but if it's mild (like hubby's), light over-ear heaphones/low volume still works fine. He uses the small Koss ones I gave him at his desk and loves them. If I like a game's soundtrack well enough, I'll leave it on. Most of the time however, after either a few hours (or for repeat playthrus) I end up turning it off and playing my own music. I do like game sound design noises to be on however, and I become mighty peeved if that's attached to the same volume slider as soundtrack/music, ala games of many many years ago. That was one of the best side advances - sound is no longer just on/off. Gotta have Speech, Music, Game sounds at minimum.

Diane Keaton, Oct. 11, age 79.

John Candy - I Like Me, via Prime Biography film, lot of interview and film snippets, of Candy and his friends/co-stars/family etc. Well done. Tries hard to hit the feels, mostly works. John Candy is still missed.

I feel like I'm the opposite. I got my phone, music and the game volume up. Now that's ADHD. Must stimulate myself or I'll have to have thoughts

I think the online/sub service/settings stuff runs kind of parallel to the "right to repair" stuff. "They've" decided there isn't enough money in making things that people can buy once and use for years. eg, something that makes ppl keep paying repeatedly, much faster/more often, is "required." Thus current effort to make ppl adopt the notion that you are not buying a product, you're buying a service. When I buy something, I expect it to work on its own - that's why I bought it. And a lot of these "services" are things that could work perfectly fine on their own with no service - which is what annoys me. If I want magical heating/super adjustable car seats, I will pay extra for such seats to be installed. I will not pay monthly so I can have them turned on as a "feature." It's like paying twice and then forever. Even if it costs no cash, you're paying with it in time and lack of functional independence (games included). Paying or being beholden to a 3rd party for a service on your ringcam that will call the cops or send alerts to your phone if it detects something while you're on vacation, that's one thing. Outside of that type of thing, no, I'm outta here.

Kind of hilarious watching Sir Kid Starver try and get Maccabi fans- unapologetic genocide enthusiasts who have both provoked and committed violence wherever they've gone- allowed in over police objections while banning Palestine Action for considerably less violence. Plus, of course, not wanting the Palestine Action decision to be subject to Judicial Review. Always a sure sign that you're confident you're in the right, when you're concerned that a judge is going to throw your decision out.

Finished Genie, Make a Wish. Ended up liking it more than I originally thought I would. Probably not going to watch it ever again, but it did give me some emotions, so I'll rate it as not bad.

Having played both they're pretty much entirely unconnected, except for having a similar establishing concept/ mechanism. They're both also better Star Trek than most of the recent TV shows despite lacking the licence.

The first one: https://www.gog.com/en/game/starcomnexus

Starcom: Unknown Space - I grabbed this on GoG for cheap and it has been fun. It is lot like Star Control. Less silly, but still has lots of weirdos to meet and planets to explore. It's good. I never played the first one, I guess this is a sequel, but they don't seem too connected.

Worse, it's usually completely quiet. The reason is that most of my gaming takes place while working and/or when everyone in my house is asleep.

Do you have ADHD or something, where you need to blast ****ty techno music over everything.

Oh, this is good news. Very useful info for me. This is what I'll do. Thanks!

It's kinda funny that I don't think I've played a game with the volume on for like 10 years.

Hey Devs. I have been seeing this among other players as well. The original night base music is so iconic to the whole game that i really believe you should bring it back for grounded 2. The night base music you have in 2 is also very good I thought you could just bring in the original as well and then perhaps in the options menu you can choose to have the nostalgic song or the new song or alternate between the two of them. Just some thoughts. The original music is just so super iconic.

I dont see the relevance? Where do you live, dont you have groups that are banned? You need to look at the specific reasons why a government bans any group to see if its fair or legitimate But you cant generalize and say " banning any group is bad " Or that would mean any Neo-Nazi , AQ or ISIS linked group would be able to operate in any country And thats obviously not the reality of the world and how most governments operate There are legitimate reasons to ban groups