Humanoid

There was a patch that added nVidia Riva 128 support to the game, which made it perform marginally less horribly. Terrible video card though, it took some cynical shortcuts to improve its performance (so nVidia could claim it beats the Voodoo 1) most notably horrible greyscale dithering. My Civ2 wonder videos which suddenly looked like someone had flicked cigarette ash all over them. Performance cheating proved to be very on-brand for nVidia over the coming years, so I suppose it's no surprise in hindsight.

Finally got around to upgrading my 1TB WD SN750 to a 2TB Kingston KC3000. Partly it's for that PCI-E 4.0 goodness, but mostly it's because the 700GB partition I had set aside for Game Pass games had proven woefully inadequate. It wasn't an actual practical problem as I had plenty of space left over on my other SSDs for the overflow, but it was bothering me that I had Game Pass games installed on the volume labelled "Steam". So now the new drive is partitioned with around ~300GB for Windows and user data, and the balance for non-Steam, non-GOG games (as those each have their own drives). Unfortunately my laziness was my downfall here as I was too lazy to plug both drives into actual M.2 slots at the same time, instead choosing to clone the old drive to the new one via a USB caddy so I'd only have to do one switcheroo afterwards. 5-and-a-half-hours later it's finally done with the copy. Yeah... Not sure what I'm doing with the old drive. I could just wipe it clean and put it back in, but I don't currently need any extra SSD space on my desktop, since I already have in excess of 5TB of SSD space now. I could upgrade my laptop drive, but it's not a gaming laptop and so the 250GB SSD that it came with isn't really a problem. I could just put it into the USB caddy and effectively turn it into a portable SSD ...but I already have one twice as large.

I think I rage quit ME3 when the second dream sequence started. I will never return to that series. In retrospect my opinion of the game has worsened even more, not helped by the defenders who claim "only the ending is bad". No, the beginning is just as bad, as is the middle, and everything else. The Mass Effect series parallels the the Rambo movies quite neatly, come to think of it. The high concept vanishes pretty much immediately after the first title. That's being too kind to ME3 though. It doesn't just lose the original point, it twists back on itself and delivers the exact opposite message it originally attempted to convey. _____ As for the others, I don't recall much of KoTOR, no strong feelings about it either way. I suspect that's because it's wedged awkwardly between my fondness (at the time) for BG2 and my general dislike of Star Wars. Never played JE.

I never played the Gold Box games when they were new, but every time I've tried them in the decade since, I could never get over the dead feeling of the locations. Y'know, how you're in a starting city or whatever, and it looks just like a dungeon because it's literally just a maze of walls until you interact with a shop door. Obviously the tech isn't there to show actual NPCs milling around in the first-person navigation view, but the games just feel so dead when compared to something like Ultima where the world felt so alive, and where I could spend hours just wandering around town without a single fight.

Oh for the (literal) day of AV. Play a bit, have a full night's sleep, rejoin in the morning.

I'm the opposite, in that I want zero potential distractions. So not only do my keys emit zero light, I don't want any illumination at all from that direction, hence the taped-up numlock LED. The keycaps are therefore bog-standard PBT plastic (as opposed to cheap ABS plastic that goes shiny with wear), That, and I don't play horror games at all.

It's odd because in the flesh, the keycaps actually look pretty much halfway between the washed-out look in my photo, and the oversaturated look on the store page, and they strike a happy medium for me. Not pastel by my definition of the term, but also not quite as searingly garish as a potential buyer might be led into thinking. At any rate, I was after a set of affordable (~$50) caps with traditional lettering and at the time the Tai Hao range seemed to fit the bill, and I simply picked the colour scheme that fit my mood at the time. There was a trap however as a lot of the models have an awful "anti-bacterial" coating that's best avoided, had to grab the non-coated variant through Massdrop if I remember right. The keyboard is actually also a (non-RGB) Das 4, it was originally one of the "Ultimate" models, i.e. the ones with blank keycaps, which I bought because it was significantly discounted (compared to the price of the regular "Professional" version. To be honest I don't love it, the flange is a bit too wide because I have a quirk where I anchor my left pinkie to the edge of the keyboard when typing. I now have some electrical tape lining the edge because the metal edge hurts my pinkie, especially as the paint has increasingly worn out and exposed the bare metal underneath. I do like that the media buttons are wholly separate though, hate keyboard with Fn alternate-mode media keys. Downside is that the actual buttons are pretty rubbish though. EDIT: I think what's also happening is that my room lighting is actually very warm, but Android/Sony's image processing is automatically removing it, so how it looks in photos is probably what it might look like if I took it outdoors. In person it looks a lot greener because of the yellow-tinted light. Anyway, a photo with less glare, though still not great. You can just make out the taped up left edge (and covered numlock LED), plus the paint wearing out on the bottom-left edge.

Probably my potato camera phone, they're Tai Hao Miami keycaps.

So a couple years ago when I built my current desktop, an Amazon shipping issue meant I ended up with four 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix 3600C16 DDR4 kits instead of two. So in the grand tradition of false economies, I figured I should use that RAM before it becomes obsolete. I've already built myself a new HTPC with one of the spare kits, but I was at a loss at what to do with the other. So completely pointlessly, I decided to build the smallest mini-ITX build I could come up with. I have no reason to have done this build, I don't need this PC at all. But here it is. Specs: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Noctua NH-L9a Gigabyte A520I ac 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix 3600MHz CL16 1TB WD SN570 Silverstone Milo 10 case Silverstone AD120-DC PSU First time using one of these PicoPSU things. It's the weird circuit board installed in the case behind that plastic sheet pictured on the right, above. Connects to an external power brick. I'm a dummy and forgot to update the BIOS before doing anything else, but I wasn't punished for it as fortunately the BIOS it shipped with was compatible with the APU out-of-the-box. Booted up okay first time, now to use my Win7 Family Pack upgrade kit (three upgrade licences of Win7 Home) for, oh, about the dozenth time.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a bug where regardless of the hit calculations, the game relies on Unreal Engine to do its thing and trace the path of the projectile from the shooter to the target. If the game engine fails to resolve the shot graphically, then you lose the hit even if it's 100%.

Well, that's literally what happened with E.T. at least, so there's precedent.

I only want one improvement and that's stealth takedowns. Anything else is just fluff.

Yeah, I did a JA2 run a year or so ago. I did sort of burn out towards the end where you were encouraged to do those truly monster battles, but at least it's right at the end. Feel the same with Long War Alien Base Assaults which have a cap of ten soldiers, but then maybe it's because those missions are so long and repetitive anyway. But I have no issue controlling eight soldiers for standard missions, especially once you get MECs and flight which reduces the demands on specific positioning.

That was true for me, 20-25 years ago. I liked the big parties and optimising them, and in general I was a completionist, a min-maxer, I consulted the most thorough walkthroughs on GameFAQs, etc. To be honest, the IWD2 thing was probably the anomaly back then, it was more an experimental thing since obviously there were no NPCs with actual personalities to bring along. It was probably during my DA:O run (which I never finished) where I had an epiphany that I no longer enjoyed this style of gameplay in RPGs, even if the next generation of solo character RPGs hadn't quite arrived for me yet (unless you count WoW which I was playing a lot of at the time). Yeah, games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 were out, but I didn't like them either. It took Obsidian and CDPR making games in that style to convince me that it was now my preferred way to play RPGs. Don't get me wrong, I still can enjoy a good tactical game like XCOM - I've put 1000 hours or so into Long War - but as its own thing and not as the basis for an RPG.

Looking into the XP sharing thing and yeah, seems the XP sharing may be adequate for my needs, and if not then it probably isn't too difficult to manually adjust things. However, the big sacrifice from an RP perspective is probably that I will need to go full spoiler mode on prospective party members - their classes, their personalities, and when I even get them - so I can pre-plan the party I'll take for the rest of the game.

That's encouraging. I remember trying to get through IWD2 some two decades ago with a party of two, but having to yield and add two more characters midway through.

It would, up until the point I found out the party AI doesn't work in turn-based mode. Massively disappointing for me since I really can't be bothered controlling a party of six manually, but nor would I ever put up with RTwP again, so I'm at an impasse now. Even four is a stretch for me, so I'm wondering how playing a small party of two, three at a push would work at lower difficulties.

Royal Blue in general is a great choice because it simultaneously leaves both fans of light and dark themes dissatisfied.

Probably more intimidating than the nominal spitting centipedes that did not spit even once, I'm sure. And yeah, I'd have had no way of knowing that the NPC is from a decade-old book, hopefully she doesn't come after me for stealing her portrait...

Figured I'd worry about the details later so I just made a thoroughly vanilla rogue and did the Temple of Trials. Nothing much to report in terms of gameplay but it does seem weird to me that they haven't tried to showcase any combat more complex than essentially 1-2 generic enemies bum-rushing you at a time, they may as well be rats for all the mechanics shown so far. Biggest complaint so far is probably the camera controls, as I can't find a way to satisfactory pan the camera around. Ideally I'd want there to be a setting to hold down a mouse button (especially since left and right mouse buttons are essentially duplicated functionality by default), but that seems a no-go. I've since looked up the mods available and there's one to assign such functionality to the middle mouse button, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but I'll try it out the next time I play. I'm a little confused why there was a temporary uncontrollable companion, who I guessed would die a few minutes into the game, but that hasn't happened. I'm now thinking it'd be cool if all my party members were autonomous like that.

Yeah, perfectly understandable. But for my purposes, I'm planning on a low-difficulty, high-roleplaying sort of a run where I'm not optimising for combat at all, and I have no issue dropping the difficulty setting way down. Fundamentally I'm just looking for a background that matches my concept for a pure thief with a middle-class merchant sort of upbringing, and so none of the backgrounds really fit, unfortunately. I thought picking "none" might give me a generic bonus, but nope, it looks like doing that is a strict handicap. So I'm going with Varisian Explorer which seems the best fit for a non-combat oriented character. I suppose in that context I'm overthinking things as I'm sure the game is perfectly playable even if I make a barely functional player character. I do still want the build to make logical sense though, and so I do still have mild concerns as for example, I'll probably start with a zero strength modifier, and it seems with their low base damage, thrown weapons really want to have a positive modifier. So then I thought I'd go with guns instead, because when skimming through all the regional backgrounds I did notice that one is for a nation known for its firearms. And yet ...no guns in this game. Figures. Kind of silly how the Alkenstar background is still in the game then. So I've packed it in for now, because after a couple of hours I still haven't been able to answer the simplest of questions: what weapon my character will even wield. I'll delve into some basic Pathfinder mechanics first before I can come to a compromise decision on that.

Thought I'd at least go through character creation today, but it's a good thing that I decided to do some preliminary research first because my plan of creating a rogue wielding throwing daggers seems to have been scuppered by, well, the game not having throwing knives. I could have been so easily tricked into taking the Knife Master subclass. Presently I'm having to look up the character backgrounds outside of the game itself, because unfortunately for the various Regional backgrounds, the game omits any sort of explanation of what or where these regions are. You'd think that these particular backgrounds would be the ones that would most benefit from a little one-paragraph blurb explaining them, but nope. Game, you don't need to tell me what a "Craftsman" is, but I'd sure like to know what the hell a "River Kingdoms Daredevil" is.

The Nomad start is the outlier in terms of not knowing Jackie before the events of the game I think? Not quite sure on that but that's the background I went with. I do want to go back and play now that throwing knives are viable (i.e. they don't disintegrate into dust after one use), but it feels I'd just be burning myself out before the expansion release.

Because of the German humour right?

I didn't even know it used cards, just the superhero angle turned me off as soon as it was announced. To an extent it felt like Firaxis becoming just yet another 2K studio since it didn't seem like something a studio making independent decisions would take on. Maybe I'm being too cynical or elitist but I can't imagine a weird superhero mash-up game being someone's - anyone's - passion project. I didn't realise the 10 year anniversary of the XCOM revival quietly passed in the last half-year. I hope I'm not being too revisionist in saying it remains the last Firaxis game I unconditionally enjoyed. In that sense I suppose I wouldn't have been particularly gung-ho about their future prospects, especially if 2K is indeed putting their foot down to a greater degree, and if moving away from Firaxis means greater creative freedom then I'd very much like to see what his next project is.