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Just picked up “Siege of Chtonia” from the local Games Workshop store. I’ll probably spend half the night browsing through it instead of sleeping edit: it’s an expansion for the Horus Heresy tabletop war game

No, not yet. Getting the car trashed around public holidays is not the best time to get the insurance companies working on it. Everyone's out of office and all that. Although it is getting ridiculous. Guess I should call them to see what's what.

Nintendo is living proof of this. Every year or two they release one of the most strikingly beautiful games when compared to its contemporaries and it runs like a champ and it does all this on wildly underpowered hardware? How do they manage this miracle? Black magic? Divine intervention? No. Stylized graphics and strong aesthetic. Look at Wind Waker, that game STILL looks amazing and it's a freakin' Wii game.

System Shock (2023) - It's a very faithful remake of one of the most important games in vidya game history. There are some quality of life improvements, though you're still going to be playing inventory Tetris, and the visuals are vastly improved, I mean, of course they are, the original is 29 years old. But yeah, the game looks great, it's got a pixelated art style, but not 8-bit pixels, or even 16-bit pixels, much much higher definition that, and the game makes fantastic use of light and color, it's wonderfully vibrant. At its core, it hasn't been changed much. It's still brutally unforgiving and Citadel Station is a maze of corridors to travel through, as it should be. You're going to get killed, numerous times, there is a rogue AI trying to murder you, after all. I very much appreciate how you can set different difficulties for each facet of gameplay. I kept all of the settings on normal difficulty except I cranked puzzle difficulty up to hard, since puzzles are my jam. I see that you are still receiving transmissions from Earth. We'll have no more of that Anyway, you sh... *static*

Kosovo really stepped in it here, it seems

https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-blizzard-ceo-audaciously-claims-that-sexism-and-harassment-problems-were-made-up-by-an-aggressive-labor-movement-trying-to-destabilize-the-company/

I became the cat's Uber driver. Now it even wants to be carried while on land.

It's downloading so hopefully I'll have some impressions later. Basketball game tonight so maybe tomorrow.

I'm pretty sure the NSA was already aware that I'm a man of refined taste that only partakes in the finest quality porn.

Yep, should get 4 scales IIRC? 1 scale per upgrade so they help a lot. Also kraken's eyes can be used in this manner though it requires 2 eyes per upgrade. I usually don't find enough eyes to get more than one upgrade out of it but there should be four in the game. So 6 possible exceptional -> superb upgrades without money or gems. And for superb -> legendary there's the magma dragon gizzard stone, plus up to four (five?) culmination stones from SSS

Honestly, the best thing about World of Warcraft was that at the time they used very simple graphics to make the game look pretty, compared to a lot of other MMOs that went for amazing but ran crap on a lot of people's hardware.

I've been playing Gloria Victis for the past couple of months. I've played M&B: Warband (and all its flavors) heavily since 2011. This has combat similar to that, but inside a PVP focused MMORPG. I'm nearly at level cap despite spending almost all of my time riding around and fighting. I swore off grinding anything except kills, and the game lets me do that. It's niche and janky, but a replacement for Warband was practically the holy grail.

Hey @BruceVC if you would like to support SA developer, the new STASIS game has been released today https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_stasis_bone_totem_with_a_special_offer

All I can think of is:

'Futurama' fuels up for Season 8 as Hulu's reboot blasts off this summer | Space

Knighthoods were abolished under Helen Clarke's Labour government and reinstated by John Key's National government a few years later- he's the politician Eleanor Catton had a very public spat with a few years ago. We kept the replacement Order of New Zealand as well because you can't have enough things to award to ex politicians, business leaders and judges (plus Sir Edmund Hillary when he was alive). Perhaps unsurprisingly John Key is now Sir John Key. AKA Sir Xian Qi after having his house bought for twice its market value by a Chinese government affiliated individual...

What put me off Hob was that after not being able to play a couple of days, I had no idea where I was going and where I had been. I felt I had to dedicate time to playing it consequently to be able to finish it.

Russia will permanently shut down a consulate in Finland and two Finnish consulates in Russia. The delightfully infantile thing about all this is how the Russian foreign ministry words itself: "Finland bears all responsibility for the current situation." So there is no Russian aggression in Ukraine, Russia is not turning its back to large parts of the diplomatic community, Russia has not done anything wrong, but its pesky little neighbour is being a nuisance and continues to do completely unacceptable things that deliberately provoke and annoy the Russian people. Let's face it, friends and neighbours, Finland is geographically effed in a serious way: on this planet, it is almost impossible to have a worse country right behind your longest border.

Stylised graphics, including pixel art, is significantly easier to read, it looks good longer, and provides lower system requirements. On the other hand, highly detailed, including "realistic", styles age rather quickly and are much harder to process. The mitigation usually includes various forms of "eagle vision" (Assassin's Creed) or "Witcher's senses" (The Witcher 3). I think, one of the Tomb Raider reboot games (haven't finished any of them) had the option to disable the paint on climbable walls. Curious how it mixed when the initial design was based on the not-subtle "hints". I suppose, if it was possible to completely disable visual junk (grass, foliage, non-interactive items that look similar to interactive ones), it would be preferable. The closest I can think of (again, haven't played) is The Last of Us 2.

I'd echo @Boeroer's stance on Spellblade being a fine pick. I've played Aloth that way before and had him use Nanassin's and he's been fairly effective with it. Against enemies resistant to poison I often had Aloth use Kalakoth's Minor Blights which are fantastic for a Spellblade as you can apply things like Gouging Strike in an aoe.

I was toying with the idea of getting a Z790 AERO. So, what now? Asus and MSI have crap service. Going ASRock of all things?

Millions of PC motherboards were sold with a firmware backdoor | Ars Technica

GW lost touch with their customers when the original company went public (shares floated in 1997 or so). People with spreadsheets (and no, not the combat stat spreadsheets) runs to company now, not the idealists who founded it int he late 70's. Important are things like the balance sheet, not consumer satisfaction (which is less important once you become a de-facto monopoly).

It has arrived, anticipation builds... and its shroud is snapped off. Literal lol. Serves me right for buying MSI instead of putting in the extra for a Sapphire I guess.