Humanoid

Darkest Dungeon finally has a new healing class to rival the Vestal.

They're generic 3D models (not just characters, any 3D modelled object really) that are purchased individually and imported into any engine. Useful for indie devs so they don't need to employ their own artists, though I suspect the reason it's most obvious in adult games is that they all buy the same base models and just drop them in with zero to minimal customisation. EDIT: Sorted by popular and the fifth result is a pre-fab Jesus for the low, low price of $243.99. If you were trying to spin a quick buck making a Christian edutainment game, it seems a pretty obvious route to take. Though apparently it's another $50 to put him into a videogame, or $1.99 extra if you wanted to 3D-print him. Hmm...

I have no idea who Neil Breen is but I will infer that it's the name of a female Japanese wrestler.

Yeah, AMD in a BIOS update around a year ago clamped down hard on how much voltage the motherboard vendors could feed the CPU to stop exploding CPU issue, and more generally the motherboard arms race, in its tracks. Not exactly the same as a power limit, but the same idea in essence. Intel are for now happy to stay in the grey area where they can use the arms race to make themselves look a couple percent better in benchmarks while maintaining plausible deniability. I am in no way absolving the motherboard vendors for acting like complete cowboys, but it is with tacit endorsement from Intel.

Star Wars is a 70s movie, so if it doesn't have 70s hair styles, is it really Star Wars? That said, the few Star Wars games I enjoy, I do so despite them being Star Wars games, not because of it. I have not, and will not ever watch a full Star Wars movie, though I suspect I've seen enough fragments of the original trilogy such that if I were able to assemble them together they would constitute a full movie.

Encased has the most ridiculous stealth system I've ever seen.

It sounds like an April Fools joke one week early, but they've just released an official statement: "We are looking at adding a feature to the Steam version of the game that will allow players that are already playing to restart the game. "

To be fair, it seems this is mostly an artifact of Steam Cloud integration messing with the one-save-per-account system (which obviously is in-itself questionable). You're supposed to be easily delete your save and start fresh, from what I understand. The microtransaction being sold is meant to be for editing your existing character. You buy an item, whether for $2 real money or whatever in-game currency it costs to buy it from a regular vendor, and it allows you to modify your character once per purchase. I feel the more egregious thing though is that the game's auteur was yapping on about how fast travel is bad for games, then immediately undermines the semi-valid point he was trying to make by selling consumable tokens that allow fast travel from anywhere. This is exactly the behaviour that one would expect from Capcom, actually. The latest Street Fighter is a huge offender, as are recent Monster Hunter games. Apparently the first Dragon's Dogma also had some cynical nickel-and-diming, but they were mostly removed by the Dark Arisen re-release/expansion which was sort of a "Definitive Edition" of that game. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to wait for Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen...

It's wild to think that you need to abuse a workaround to do so without paying $2.

Yeah, it'll probably be a good gig for an up-and-coming studio to try to make a name for themselves, even if they have to put up with working with the awfulness of Hasbro/WoTC for a while. I imagine multiple such projects will be commissioned now.

While I wouldn't have minded some new additional content for BG3 before saying goodbye, ultimately I think it's the right decision for Larian to do their own thing instead of hitching their wagon to the D&D licence. I'm steadfast in my opinion that BG3 is good in spite of being a D&D game, not because of it. No matter what you think of the state of BioWare today, few would argue that they made the wrong decision by abandoning the KoTOR series after one game and going their own way with homegrown IP.

There's hope yet for Limbo of the Lost!

I've never really considered their total body of work too closely, so just my snap opinions on each listed: KoTOR2 - My video card (a 7900GT? Something like that) died before I finished the tutorial. Never went back to it, bearing in mind this was a few years after the original release as is, probably circa 2007? So I was already sort of forcing myself to play it in the first place, never really had a strong incentive to because I don't like Star Wars. (I don't hate it, I just tolerate it in a gaming context if it's a good game regardless of IP) NWN2 - I have no memories whether positive or negative about the original campaign. I assume my save just petered out somewhere around mid-game but who knows. I couldn't get through the MoTB tutorial because of D&D sneak attack rules meant my rogue was not viable. I did play SoZ up until the final dungeon and liked it well enough. Alpha Protocol - Never finished it but admired the structure and ambition. The mechanical jankiness wasn't actually that big of a deal for me because I don't generally play this type of game for the challenge. I didn't particularly liked the timed dialogue and the lack of customisation. New Vegas - One of the best games of all time. Dungeon Siege - Dunno, I don't play ARPGs. South Park - Very good until the zombie apocalypse ruined everything that came after, which felt like filler. Damn shame. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity series - I'd outgrown RTwP by this point and couldn't get into any of them. Yes I know Deadfire got a turn-based mode later, but a bit too late and without the game being designed whole-cloth with it in mind, the patch could not address the issue of far too much combat. The Outer Worlds - I abandoned it early due to the poor handling of stealth, turning it into far too much of a shooter for my tastes. The only reason I tolerate games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and Cyberpunk is because I can bypass their clunky combat mechanics, which is not possible in TOW. Grounded - Dunno, don't play survival games. Maybe if I had a regular group to play co-op with, but no chance solo. Pentiment - Should be up my alley, just need to overcome inertia to get around to it. It's only been out for ...wait it's been more than a year??? Where did the time go? (To be honest, I spent less time on video games in 2023 since, oh, probably since the late 80s)

I never gave much thought to the pronunciation of Dune with or without a hidden 'y', but hearing it a few times lately and all I can see in my mind's eye is "Doon". I'm no linguist but it kinda feels American. Is it?

Fair, it's just that I've never heard it talked about like that before. Perhaps not so surprising given almost my entire knowledge of baseball comes from The Naked Gun. Whenever the annual 10 hour trial of FIFA on EA Play rolls around, I start a career mode as a lower league player and figure I'll make a proper go of it. But then I get around a third of a season in (somewhere between a dozen games and two) and I feel I'm done with the game until the next instalment.