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From the article, Let us work towards affordable renewable energy and the fossil-fuel dictatorships having no power over us, wherever they may be located.

So, Diablo IV season is done. This is the shortest time it took for me to clear one, and I generally tend to take my time rather than plow through the content in an efficient fashion. Not that I mind that much.

I finished the main plot in Hogwarts Legacy. Overall I think it is a good game. A bit too Elder Scrolls like perhaps and a bit too collection focused. I think every bit of content overstays its welcome just a tad. The good thing is, for the bonuses you don't need to do everything. Just over half the Merlin Trials unlock max inventory. You can ignore the other forty something trials. The game doesn't force you to do every repetitive thing. The writing works. The plot works. The endless hordes of enemies do not work for a game that is focused on such a small area. The hundreds of poachers you kill mean you basically depopulated the wider area around Hogwarts and Hogsmead. Some comments the characters make are very on point. When your character wonders why nobody has looted the chests in the dungeon, even though you known it has been explored before. When you wonder why your professor has very specific ingredients for a potion on hand. Whoever wrote the story has felt those plot quibbles themselves and isn't above some self irony when they find themselves in that situation. It's the exact type of little thing that wins me over. The combat is fun. It is far more involved than a lot of action rpgs. The different spell combos and the way different spells may uniquely interact with different enemies are great. I still need to figure out how to hit a troll with their club. I don't like all the voice actors. I understand criticism that it is less a game about going to wizarding school and more a run around kill stuff game. I don't know how a school simulator would have been fun though.

You're good lol, we all have blonde moments ha.

Finished Hollow Knight and strongly disliked it. Thus, I can safely skip Silksong. Currently playing Promise Mascot Agency. The game is incredibly enjoyable in both story and gameplay and feels like Saints Row without combat (the car can climb like a Tamriel horse and glide) and with every gang member having their own sub-plot. The main character is not customisable, but having an ace vegan who can and does beat the **** out of everything on his way while talking about the joys of the chosen family is quite welcome. Also this:

Nope, it just means that Disney are lazy. They think they need to add one very scary scene into almost every movie because it is their shortcut for emotional responses. Just as they so often kill off a family member to make the audience bond with the protagonist - they use shortcuts. The Lion King is not so complex a story that a five year old can't understand it. But a lot of five year olds get scared at that one scene.

You can already pick a specific crisis to happen, so I doubt that's much of a concern, I just want the inverse option: the ability to exclude certain crises without turning off the entire DLC they are in. Cetana is also very different from every other crisis. Most crises shake up the galaxy with their rampages, as generally by the time they spawn borders are kinda entrenched, and the crisis forces the galaxy to take action, shaking up borders and the political landscape. As far as I can tell that's their whole point. Cetana is just "there", and unless you, as the player, do a bunch of stuff, and set up very specific fleet compositions to deal with her insane difficulty (compared to every other crisis out there) there's really nothing happening until she presses her "I win"-button. The AI won't lift a finger, not even when she declares war on the entire galaxy (not that, given her power levels, they'd be much help anyway), and until she does it's pretty much business as usual. She may be fun once, or for some challenge run, but by and large I'd call her boring, as there's a whole lot of nothing, then a single massive fleet battle that you hopefully win, and...that's kinda it... If you beat her the game is basically over as there's probably not a whole lot left to do until the victory year as I'd be rather surprised that anyone able to beat Cetana would be having any issues beating up the rest of the galaxy after, if need be. Honestly, design-wise she really feels more like an elaborate event-chain than an endgame crisis. Maybe in a game with multiple crises having her mixed in, I can see that being more engaging, but on default settings with only the single major crisis? I'd rather not have it be her.

Well, it clearly says it's a group of investors, with the Saudi PIF being one of them. Throwing "Saudi" into the title seems to be just clickbait. And personally, I think this may be the best thing to happen to all of EA's IPs, in my case especially the DA IP.

I made a cognac sour with amaretto because I ran out of cointreau for sidecars and it works out well enough, I imagine an inverted version of Morganthaler's Amaretto sour would hot better though.

I also should add, it has to be made at the Cookery, not the workbench as your screenshot is of.

Played a bit off Endless Legend 2 early access. Looks really good. Thematics are on point (Amplitude are generally good on that), graphics looks pretty, it runs smooth (smoother than Endless Legend 1 does for me, wtf). Mechanics don't know about yet, haven't played enough. Only thing so far I really didn't like is no governor heroes. Those were quite fun in EL1 and ES2.

That is one of those annoying things that make me certain developers aren't gamers: Let me disable the unfun things and enjoy your game.

Parked my last Stellaris game after I basically won (Galactic Emperor, smacked the Contingency, and enough fleet power to walk over anyone who even looked at me funny). Almost thought I managed to make the Unbidden spawn, but seems Ultima Vergilis just is being ominous when you already beat the crisis, shame. Started a new game and since I usually turtle I figured I'd force myself into early combat by going at is as a Driven Exterminator Gestalt Consciousness. Only to spawn between two Fallen Empires and another Driven Exterminator. Great. Also ended up running into some major Trade deficit issues because I'm not familiar with how to play machines, so ended up mostly turtling anyway while I figured out/fixed my economy. At that point one of the Fallen Empires decides to awaken, and since I can't handle them in a fair fight I build up fortress systems and fleets like mad and shelve any plans for wanton galactic murder sprees. Aaaand then Cetana decides to spawn, obliterating the FE(s), taking some of my (fortified) systems with her and then just basically ruining the rest of the game (as far as I'm concerned). All the research options for the crisis end up outside my borders, so unless I want to fight a whole load of wars to get to them I have no access to them. So I have content myself with nabbing her transports, trying to get somewhere with the situation that way. Unfortunately she somehow goes hostile before she declares war somehow, despite me having "good" rep (bug?) and just "removes" some of my biggest fleets (not even combat, just dialogue and *poof* fleet gone...). Once she finally does declare war I try beelining her with everything I have left but just get smacked like a fly. She, herself, has 1.5m fleet power, and the rest of the crap in the system she hides in counts for another million or so, even before losing a bunch of ships to bs I managed only like half that. AI doesn't even try to deal with her, like at all, unlike every other crisis where at least they can act as a distraction. Might as well be alone in the galaxy for this one, and can't rely on Fallen Empires to do, well ... anything as she just outright murders them with a 100% guarantee when she spawns. This is also where I learned you can't disable a specific crisis, you can pick a specific one, but you can't say "give me any random one, except for that one", which is annoying as from what I've seen I don't think I want her in most of my games (but I don't necessarily want to disable the whole DLC) as she seems ridiculously over-tuned compared to every other crisis (and I just generally dislike things being on timers like this).

Maybe in another 5-10 years I can just buy a mini-pc/mini-desktop for $1600 and be fine, since I'm guessing my caring for mega gaming will wane ever more anyway. Yeah yeah, just buy a console. But something like this is simply more interesting to me - plus at least it's a PC, not just a game and TV cube. Anyway, with some setting tweaking the fact it runs BL4 at 1080 or even 1440 with "playable" fps is kinda cool.

Oh yeah, it is pretty annoying to me as well. I still have "brain-muscle memory" from the old Microprose game for tactics used to clear landing/terror sites, and keep forgetting, about this mechanic, which leads to a lot of reloads

Yes, something I didn’t like about FiraXCOM was how pod activation was the most important mechanic on the game. You can go through a mission and not get a single shot aimed at you, or you can make last move in your turn, unveil one or two extra tiles and have a new pod or two take a shot at your squad.

I'm pretty sure the last phase of Grand Mother Silk has some patterns that cannot be avoided. She sometimes throws her blades at you from beyond the screen while you have to track spikes on the ground or falling debris, and they're way too fast to dodge without seeing them being launched. Other than that, was okay-ish for a "final" boss fight, but of an uninspired Radiance knockoff. Onwards to act three, after I get rid of the curse, that is.

^ I read most of all that thinking "Path of Exile" and became rather confused. Becoming "bored" of NMS again, in terms of actual space-hopping gameplay. I keep wanting to make new 'Vette ship designs as something to do, but it becomes a bit annoying re: total ships owned limits and not being able to, say, save a blueprint of a design to insta-build it (if you have all the parts) again. If you keep changing/redesigning the same 2 or 3 to "save ship limit space", you're going to forget how to make that one extra cool one you stumbled upon the design for last week. Screenshots help, but not enough. Anyway - ---I wanted to try making a huuuuuge one for once. Got this fairly nice looking design going and then - the game crashed before I finalized/saved it, and I lost it. lulz.

I concur. On the "story," point, yes initially I wrote it as "story" and then changed it to "storytelling." I should've left it the way I originally had my post. On the companions' stories in 1, I loved that for several of them their stories had hooks in the main story and so choices in one affected outcomes (ending slides) in the other. And I cared about the companions' stories and their outcomes. Even Durance, who I recall utterly disliking the first time I played the game way back when, I ended up liking and feeling sympathy for him this time around due to differences in how I roleplayed things. The one negative in PoE1 for me was that I felt there were way too many consumables (and crafting materials). By this I mean way too many different TYPES of consumables, whereby it became too overwhelming for me to try and keep track of what things did what for me. So I hardly ever used any of my consumables, even including scrolls, and never bothered with crafting anything. A lot of game development resources couldv'e been saved going with fewer different types of scrolls/spells, potions, foods, etc.

I finally finished my playthrough of PoE1 including both DLCs. It was a very fun experience. Because I had not replayed the game in a very long time, I had forgotten much of the story and the lore, and so it was like playing the game for the first time. It was clear to me that although PoE2 is mechanically the better of the two, PoE1 is better by a wide margin than 2 in storytelling, character development (especially the companions), world-building, and side quests. This is surprising and puzzling to me because PoE2 is the sequel, and had a bigger budget. But it comes across to me as if the game development team, including JES, didn't have their hearts in PoE2 as much as they did in PoE1. Just my take.

---"Has Manor Lords released any major update re: gameplay mechanics? It's been months." .... "Nope." ---"Is Timberborn or Farthest Frontier out of EA yet?" .... "Nope." ---"I could temp-buy BL4 just to lol at performance on my rig" ... "nah, or not for a week or two." ---"I should really turn on/try Tainted Grail's "big patch". Although with the patch for the patch, it's seeming more like it's a "Big Nerf Patch" (NG+ might still be fun tho). ---"I should really try 7 Days to Die most recent 2.0## patch even if I just go back to an older version again." ---"I should buy/check out Bustafellows sequel (virtual novel, I liked the 1st one)" *stares at her Steam client list etc* *No Man's Sky, PLAY*

LULZ @ Gearbox and them trying to tell ppl how to optimize their settings for their game. --5070ti@ 1440 = dlss-balanced, 4x frame gen, veryhigh/high/some medium, for "60+fps." Note, that 60+ fps is with FRAME GEN on. Welcome to your $800 720p gpu (or whatever) --I'm becoming super curious re: my rig, just like I was with Indy. I think I could get to the main map in under 75 mins (30+ min for settings/shaders). I bet DLSS performance (no frame gen), mostly Low for stuttery 45fps. --Watching Cohh play the game, they've gone more fast-combat paced (like BL3 on speed). Not saying that's bad, I'm sure some may love any/most gameplay changes these days, but for some of us old-timers, it's that it becomes less like original BL feels each new game. Hubby watched some bits and is only 1/3 interested now - and he's the mega-BL person (he still replays BL1/BL2 once a year).

Why? Because I can, of course. (parked and sitting on the roof, chillin') - (yes you can also walk into the two 'huts') - (want to deco it even more, actually)

He's going to make them swear an oath of fealty to Mango Mussolini and purge those who would object to deploying the military for homeland defense against left-wing terror networks like BML and Antifa. There's also a government shutdown right around the corner for a little bit of a information blackout and some (or a lot of) convenient firings. There's always a chance he'll let them wage war against the sea. With this administration, we're not that far removed from the worst erratic behaviour that was ascribed to unpopular Roman empires in later written histories.

I mostly agree, with coveats. I don’t think PoE story is “better told”. Too much of it is uninteractive, too much of it is told through NPCs talking at you and books abd too little through quests. But I do think it is a better story. What PoE2 lacks to me is personal hook for our protagonist. I never found Eothas destroying Caed Nua compelling as without experiencing this event in the sequel we get a “cutscene” and it is just not enough to care. It’s as if Mass Effect destroyed Normandy in a hand drawn cutscene rather than open with it. Similarly, reuniting our soul and confronting Eothas - it’s all confusing and impersonal and unrelatable. In PoE1 we experience consequences of the awakening and as we progressed we better realised what it could mean for us. In PoE1 it’s just “oh yeah part of your soul in in Eothas so keep close”. PoE1 had more relatable stories and dilemmas of companions which I think helped ground the god thread and give it resonance. Without it it’s tricky to care about bickerings of fictional gods.