Humanoid

Played through the WoW Forever beta since Maccas were giving away beta keys for around one-eighth the amount of reward points a Big Mac would cost. This is the first time I've played WoW since 2019. It's... well, it's WoW alright. The general feel is much the same as I remember the original experience being. Sure there are minor class changes and a few additional quests added to each zone, but they're barely noticable up to the current level cap of 20. in terms of genuinely new content so far, there's one new dungeon for each faction. There's a weird dichotomy now where crafted items, dungeon loot and dungeon quest rewards are very optimised, but world quest rewards are pretty much unchanged from 20 years ago and overwhelmingly suck. With more of your power level being intentionally shifted to gear rather than baseline for each spell/ability, if you don't do crafting and/or dungeons regularly, you are going to suffer. _____ EDIT: Also playing a bit of Theme Hospital with the fairly recent major CorsixTH update. Still great, but I have to admit that there are a lot of elements of the game I'd been looking at through rose-tinted glasses. I can't play more than one level a day because every level essentially plays the same to begin with.

Fallout: New Zealand doesn't have to be post-apocalyptic if nothing bad happened there.

Yeah, but it likely just goes to show that what Obsidian make in the future will still be a Microsoft decision and not a Bethesda Softworks one like a lot of the immediate reactions here and elsewhere are fearing.

Lord Jim interregnum, part 2?

Bethesda published Dishonored, they can publish a follow-up to Alpha Protocol.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 beats all of them.

I couldn't justify paying the upfront fee to try Midnight (or let's face it, to try player housing), but I could certainly see myself playing this variant for a month at least. Hopefully I still have enough gold in my bank from when I last played in 2019 to buy one month of gametime.

The main thing about the time limit that sounds questionable to me is that the act of simply using skill points consumes time. That sound utterly bizarre to me. Morti's review mentioned that he finished the game with a hatful of unused points because it wasn't worth that sacrifice to use them. It means the mechanic takes a weird meta turn, where instead of choosing between doing quest A or quest B as is seemingly intended, you instead do both quests and then just not use your skill points if you feel you're powerful enough already. That said, "failing" the limit is not a game over, and apparently it's something that people going for a second playthrough may be nudged into doing deliberately.

Starcraft Adventures

It's just really hard to get me to play a vampire game in general, horror is something I steer well clear of. Sure, if it's absolutely exceptional like Bloodlines I'll make an exception, but that's literally been a one-off in my decades of gaming. The reviews for Dawnwalker on the other hand seem to be more along the lines of "great first effort by a rookie studio" rather than simply "great". Minor point, but the PC version supposedly needs some patching to be as polished as the console versions are at launch. Anyway, the only thing I'm playing at the moment is Two Point Museum, and only a few hours a week. Don't know how I feel about it overall yet, I'm finding the expedition mechanic a bit unfun at the moment and it's dragging the game down a bit. I've let my Game Pass subscription lapse so my Avowed save is back on ice, as is my intention to finally start KCD2 after that. Though I might just buy it outright if I catch a good price on GOG. Another thing I'm considering is getting Tabletop Simulator (sadly Steam only) in order to play the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective game.

Last GTA I played was San Andreas. At the start of the game, there's a section where you have to mash certain buttons in order to ride a bike to flee ...something I've long since forgotten. Anyway, I failed to ride that bike a dozen times or so and have never touched the series since.

Similarly, I find myself logged out of the forums so often and because I have my password in a password manager, I can't be bothered logging back in unless I happen to have already opened the password manager to do something else. On a completely different note, I had accepted for a long time that a lot of users here had broken avatars, and assumed it might have been because of the forum software upgrade/migration. But only recently did I find that it was a result of my blocking the path used for the banner ads at the top of the forum. For some reason, a bunch of people's custom avatars are stored in the same location as the ads (obsidian-forums.s3.amazonaws.com/monthly_202x_xx), weird.

Yeah, can't really do that because then I'd have to count the tens of thousands of times I've replayed Freecell.

Depends on the genre, surely. The examples you've given are RPGs or open world games with big time commitments, and I likewise almost never replay an RPG. But adventure games? All the time. Either Fate of Atlantis or Day of the Tentacle probably takes the crown for me. For a non-adventure game that involves a fairly decent time commitment, I'd say Privateer.

Unless there's a separate project I'm not aware of, this just seems to be the old game patched up just enough so people won't refund it immediately due to crashes after buying it.