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Was up late for other reasons, so when time came, went to buy Manor Lords (on Steam, for the moment): --- "Too many people want to buy this game, so you can't right now, try again later." --- "But not too many times in a row or you'll hit our attempts limit and be frozen out for a while." I guess millions of wishlisters is too much for Steam's purchase software. Bought it, it started fine, spent 15 minutes with settings and such (will be doing EZ no-combat mode while learning town mechanics, then try normal mode). Game loaded me into a spot with baskets of bread, 1 ox, and some peasants. Looks nice. But I save and exit. Sadly too tired from staying up all night to test-play within "2 hr time limit" window. Later. But I did make an angry squirrel, purple-white coat of arms to match my purple dress/white hat wearing, grumpy old fart female avatar. Color/mood matching is important after all.

would never go back to fallout 3 fnv at least have good atmosphere and casino

Terror from the Void, a total conversion mod for Phoenix Point reached 1.0. I meant to check it out for a long time - Phoenix Point was a game with a fantastic pitch, and some good ideas in the finished product, that seemed to lack polish to really deliver. I am somehow doubtful if a mod can fix game's issues, but there are some smart and insightful folks behind it. I am curious if they managed to achieve their vision. Will have to make some time for it in a near future. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/839770/view/4176601697647254493

Manor Lords: played an hour and a half or so. I like it enough I won't refund it. Probably play it for a while then shelve it for a year to see what happens etc. Anyway...in its current initial early-access form: ---the early pace of the city-build aspect is verrrrry slow. It seems that it's one house/family=one building/job. At least at the start? So you build house plots and wait, and wait, for new families arrive. All city builders do this to some extent but Manor Lords feels extra slow. Plus building times are extra long. I do like the methods for laying out house plots and buildings/roads ---there are work oxen (you start with 1) which basically are needed for many buildings to function. They can die. I recommend buying at least a 2nd with initial small start funds immediately. Because having zero ox with zero funds would be bad. ---the 1st person viewpoint is very nice for tourism. Although the visible avatar is always this red robed dude (not even a matching generic female version yet). ---Game performance is fine/great for me. ---haven't really looked at the progression/skill tree yet. There's an influence upgrade/points system and I'm not sure how hard it'll be to get it up quickly without any combat/bandits.

Stray Blade. Finished about 2 weeks ago, but have not (possibly, will not) written a review. The action-adventure was not especially horrible, but it was not exactly good. I liked the general plot (the twist was more funny than tragic), the main characters, the character customisation options (the MC always wore a full suit of armour and a closed helmet), the rebindable controls, and the 2D cut-scenes/art. On the other hand, the combat was generally irritating, there were relatively few bosses (7, with the beast generals being rather underwhelming), the exploration was not exactly engaging (most weapon blueprints were dropping from any human enemy based on the MC's level), the number of save slots was limited to 1 (granted, the story was linear and the last save was before the point of no-return), the graphics did not align with the system requirements and performance (I had severe FPS drops in some areas). Fallout 4. I continued my 8 year-old save file. The side effect is that I have a very vague recollection of what is in my inventory or who the child at the main settlement is. The inventory management in general is rather painful - there are a lot of items, but the sorting options are very limited and have to be cycled through (I am also only guessing the abbreviations). With the Full Dialogue mod I at least know what the PC would say, so that's very nice. The number of the dialogue options being limited to 4 is less nice. The combat is rather horrible. On the other hand, making engaging first-person combat is challenging. So, I have reached the Far Harbor town in search of Kasumi, whom her parents asked to bring home or to confirm that she had left on her own. The first battle at the town's gates took me several attempts to get through. Afterwards, the locals asked me to kills some random ghouls and mantis-like creature and find some tools to reinforce the gates. One of the locals offered to guide to the town where Kasumi supposedly had gone. On the way to the mantis-like creature, I found a Vault and something I initially thought to be a weird bush. It was a Legendary irradiated yao guai.

Here's my handsome Bleak Walker in all his glory:

The funny thing is, the developer sent out a newsletter email yesterday advertising the mod.

I have utterly no clue what I'm doing, but apparently it'll still look kinda pretty. Also, this is just the loading screen, but I rather liked it.

NASA's Advanced Solar Sail Has Successfully Deployed in Space

The game may not be pretty, but it allowed me to paint my ship poison green to make my opponents' eyes bleed. Aesthetic warfare.

Sounds like a trainwreck that got over 9000 kilos of liquefied **** dumped on it before being lit on fire. Uhhhh, man I'm struggling to say anything about this because it well and truly looks like a very bad time. Like you go from bad music to borderline pedophile stuff to bad cgi in loops until mercifully the credits roll and when you think you're finally through you get a post-credits scene of Tuxedo Kamen impregnating his teenage bride which is grounds to have everyone involved in making this get ora'ed or muda'ed. What the actual ****? If this was a dark seinen or josei like Madoka or Narutaru maybe that'd work, despite the dubious quality, but this is just damn creepy to see done unironically.

Holy spoilers, Batman! I was planning on watching this, and you went and just ruined the whole thing. . . . Is what I would say if I had received a frontal lobotomy sometime within the last 24 hours. That's perpetually my experience with modern anime: things that are clearly supposed to come across as being 'cute' to the viewer instead almost always seem some combination of manipulative, wrongheaded, and creepy/uncomfortable to me, which has the effect of taking me out of the whole thing really quick when I can palpably sense that I'm at odds with whatever I'm watching. Though there have always been hacks creating shows/movies while not knowing how or not wanting to put in the work to make something effective (usually instead using cheap shortcuts, or sometimes not even that!), I really feel like sensibilities for what's okay have changed to the point where I cannot cope. I didn't think it was that bad...but I was watching it with my eyes squinted to the point where they were only one planck length open, which may have had something to do with it. Honestly? From all the characters I've seen in your screenshots from this show, she looks the closest to her original design. Maybe seeing her in motion would change my mind, but she doesn't look nearly as weird or creepy as...uh, everyone else. I mean, just look at some of the main cast just one screenshot below this one, they all look like sneople. What an abominable art style, and what's scary is that it's so much better than the first season too! WHAT?! Apparently, this more or less follows the original manga story: she appears and then she is immediately destroyed by the Sailor Starlights. It doesn't really make sense or work on any level, especially once you know that these corrupted Sailor Guardians have been brainwashed and actually are good (which the writers of the Sailor Stars season obviously recognized with how they and their fates were re-written), but that's Naoko's Takeuchi's (self-admitted) terrible writing for you. I suppose I can at least be thankful that she did appear for a page or two in the manga, because that lead to her being much more extensively used in the show. Oh man, I figured we were like at least an hour in at this point. The one you always hated was...Makoto and Ami, wasn't it? So they obliterated those two together and now are feeding into the other two? Ugh. I have seen more convincing planets in space in N64 games. Yeah, as mentioned above. I am a little confused as to whether these corrupt Sailor Guardians are actually supposed to be corrupt/brainwashed in the manga and this show, or whether that was an invention of the original TV show when they tried to flesh these characters out. And honest to god, the show doesn't even flesh them out that much, but the time spent with them doing all the silly episodic hijinks combined with the little bit of additional story about them does wonders for them in comparison to this trash. I guess if you don't read them as being brainwashed, and that they're more just "fallen" (i.e. willing) Sailor Guardians, it makes more sense that they just keep getting killed over and over, but it's still real bad. Gosh, I miss Japanese lady voices from the 70s-90s: these are the same songs, but the voices just suck. You know, the Amazoness Quartet was probably my favorite part of SuperS...not that there was a ton of competition, given the bad writing for the main cast, the awful writing for Nehellenia, the wretched writing for the Amazon Trio, and the disgusting writing for Pegasus and Chibi-Usa. I thought they seemed to be the only part of that season that wasn't completely out of place when compared to the other seasons: they were pretty silly, fun, and overall harmless compared to everything else. I'm sure they were stupid in the manga and Crystal, though. And there it is. Guess I did correctly remember that this was the one you hated. ok.jpeg Sorry, I can't make any promises.

Last boss:

I sometimes come across these as recommended videos. I think they've done a good job at fixing the speed, frame rate and colorize some of these old clips from the late 1800's and early 1900's... A personal favourite of mine, the last known footage of the Bismarck (movie shot from the perspective of the accompanying Prinz Eugen)

Skynut is coming.

The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more | Ars Technica