Humanoid

This is blatantly false, Wikipedia tells me that South Africa made the famous Genital Jousting.

Sounds like Long War alright.

I just take the bus everywhere.

3200C14 which is reasonably good stuff, more or less equivalent to 3600C16. One notch above the more common 3200C16 or 3600C18 for about 20% more money, and probably pretty representative of what a upper-midrange gamer might buy without going nuts.

I just feel it's a lot more natural for such a commonly used term to be monosyllabilic. Even "Eds" would do. Of course, this was a decision made decades ago so the time to complain would have been then I suppose.

I've been toying with the idea of a mild mini-ITX system for use with an ultrawide monitor for sim gaming, but this release doesn't really add new options. Was always a long shot anyway since any benefit would have to overcome the fact I have some good DDR4 lying around spare. That said, good B550 ITX boards are currently extortionately priced so if there's any opportunity for an alternate platform, it's because of that. The main motivation is that it's a right pain to set up specialist peripherals at my main desk, and my displays are unsuited for ultrawide gaming unless the games are low spec enough to happily run 7680x1440. Looks like if it happens this year I'll be fine settling for a 5600 non-X with whatever video card represents good value at the ~$500 mark when it happens. Unless of course I get into MS Flight Sim in which case it'd probably receive my current RX 6800 at minimum.

"Eddies" for me. I reckon if a substitute for "bucks" consists of more than one syllable, then it's a pointless alternative. For this reason, "creds" tends to be acceptable.

One of the biggest criticisms of the game that I recall is that it becomes trivially easy past the mid-game. Guns one-shotting enemies through walls, single quick-hacks, taking out entire rooms of mooks, etc. I don't know if this has been addressed by any rebalance patches since I last played a little over a year ago, but I think it's likely you'll have no issues. Hell, maybe it'll enhance your late-game experience by not having a game-breaking build. I can't really delve deeper into specifics admittedly because as a dedicated stealth player the game difficulty is essentially static throughout the course of the game.

The biggest advantage of stealth is that you can mostly ignore your gear. I hate micromanaging my inventory and therefore just rolled through most of the game without looking at it. Maybe every 10 hours or so I'll do a proper clean-out of my bags by equipping the best stuff I happened to have randomly looted since my last clean-out, and disassemble or sell the rest. Worked with no issue ...until the one forced boss fight 2/3rds through the game. Still, I managed to get through that by brute forcing it with the best melee weapon I happened to have in my bags and chugging health potions, despite zero points invested into melee. That said, the main reason I did it is because I always play RPGs as a combat-avoidant thief. I don't think there's any particular reason to force yourself to play that way. I'm no pacifist mind you, and the reason my body count was so low wasn't because of any overriding principle, but because back when I played, throwing knives were single use items and *expensive*. Nowadays they're reusable so it's a lot more viable to perform silent kills at a distance and I imagine it'd save a lot of time waiting for enemies to path just right to take them out.

Whatever happened to that 3E conversion mod for BG2 anyway?

Back in the early days of the GPU we had fairly sedate names and coolers but absolutely wild box art. Now that's been flipped around so much that for the RTX 3000 series you can't even read what card it is unless you squint - nVidia's standardised box design means the text that says "3070" or whatever is in white text on lime green, in tiny font, at the bottom corner of the box. It's insane.

Just skip ahead and mandate all new house builds have their own air conditioned, sound-proofed "server room" to house their PC separately from where the user actually sits. So it's official then, Bokishi knows more about the 4000 series than EVGA does.

They're probably just a bit too swingy and therefore have a bit of an undue balance on how a particular game plays out. Particularly true when trying to learn good, reliable early game strategies.

Like many players, I have the additional sources of RNG like goodie huts and random events turned off. The AI cheats are generally not cheats in the sense that they have access to different mechanics, but that they essentially have a bunch of effective 'sliders' and as you ramp up the difficulty, things like their units and techs become cheaper for them, their maintenance costs for units and cities are reduced, etc. They also get more units to start the game which makes the most expedient way to win game - early rushes - increasingly less viable for the player. Notably they also get a free worker from Monarch level, and a free extra Settler at Deity.

I play with animations off, which brings its own set of issues - namely having to read the event log to figure out what I just lost. But at least I'd be able to execute a single war in one session that way.

As someone who now exclusively plays thieves, I'm glad current me can measure up to ten year-old you in terms of skill. As for ten year-old me, I distinctly remember playing Civ1 where I thought that not only was it a good idea to place cities directly adjacent to each other, but that the logic of doing so could be extended further to place a square of 2x2 cities in as many tiles, or indeed 3x2. I distinctly remember doing this as France on the official Earth scenario map and sending a trickle of Musketeers down to Africa to veeeeery slowly defeat Shaka. Bear in mind Musketeers in that game have a amazing ...2 points in Attack, ahead of only the Militia that you start the game with. Sid mercifully added a restriction in the sequel to disallow this particular urban arrangement. The reveal will be that they're a party of adventurers hired to escort an idiot NPC on behalf of a rich relative and they begrudgingly put up with you for the money, unbeknownst to you.

I think BG2 might have been the last RPG I played where my primary run was with a male PC. This may have been influenced by Anomen, but I can't say for sure. I don't think I ever let him join, but then I was never one to rotate companions much. Looking at a list of BG2 companions to try to remember who was in my core party and I see BG2EE added ...a bear? Well, it has the best portrait of the new additions at least. Anyway, I was a boring goody two-shoes back then so I probably just had a fairly default looking party - Sorcerer PC, Minsc, Jaheira, Aerie, Valygar, Keldorn I think? These days, well, I'd probably try to play a solo pure Thief and fail to get out of tutorial dungeon.

To me, yes. But to be fair, I skipped Civ5 pretty much entirely so I can't say much about that game. Civ6 I played a moderate amount, a fair few starts but maybe only 2-3 saves to completion. It's fine as a standalone game with all DLC and I have no singular big problem with it, but I find it's just slight lacking a bit in pretty much every aspect compared to Civ4 and consequently playing well does not give me any real sense of satisfaction. A big caveat is that I'm not ashamed to say I never did particularly mind the stack of doom "issue" in Civ4. Given that it's most commonly stated complaint about the game, I wouldn't be surprised to see people's preference on the old versus the new system might be entirely down to which approach they prefer. A big knock-on effect of that fundamental change however is that while the AI is extremely poor in every single instalment of Civilization, the one-unit-per-tile rule of the newer games massively trips it up to the point of near-paralysis. As a result, it's commonly believed that the hardest difficulty in Civ6 is only about as hard as the third-highest difficulty in Civ4 even with the extreme levels of cheating it does. It's interesting to me that I can love a game with so many problems so much. The AI as mentioned is primitive, the graphics were bland even for its time, the balancing of the various leaders and units is non-existent, it lost all the personality of its predecessors (and Alpha Centauri in particular), and the UI needs modding to reach the level of simply "reasonably usable". And yet it's an everpresent in any list of my top 5 games of all time.

It's been a few years since I last played Civ4, let's just play a short game on a small map to get back into shape. 15 hours across the weekend later... Yeah, to be fair I did string it out a bit. Standard Monarch game on Continents which is my old level, mowed down my own continent with ease then messed around until the modern era to invade the other continent with combined arms, full carrier groups and amphibious assaults and all that. That's probably why I'll never be an Immortal, let alone Deity level player, playing optimally over the course of a full game is far too mentally taxing and you don't get to mess around with the fun toys. Meanwhile I'm up to the second-last level of Two Point Campus. It's fine, but the feeling I increasingly get with it is that I wish they'd port the various quality-of-life improvements it has back to Hospital. Maybe I should try sandbox mode because it's a very easy game when you're just going through the motions to tick the objective checkboxes.

They may claim to be exiting the market altogether, but no real reason to believe it's the absolute truth beyond the immediate short-term. It may be posturing for a better deal given it would be irresponsible for AMD/Intel to not even try talking. It may be because they feel it's too late to pivot right now with the next-gen launch being imminent, and that there's no reason to commit to any vendor before seeing the generation that follows. It may be some vestigial contractual with nVidia that they cannot, or cannot afford to break yet. Linus speculates that it may be fear of being blacklisted *on an individual employee level*, which would be rough on any imminently departing staff. At any rate, the way they've done it for now is probably sensible. It was only ever going to get worse if they stayed, the hotter, thirstier 4000 series will no doubt require even heftier engineering in terms of the cooler, the PCB, and everything sandwiched between the two. And those extra costs will likely be wholly borne by the board partners. Without the ability to set margins, and without the (crypto) conditions that set up the price bubble of the previous generation, the forthcoming one may skip the "initially profitable" part of the product's lifecycle and jump straight to the money sink phase.

How to make your main series game look like a cheap spinoff.

Yeah, I did Solasta as a bunch of ~2 hour co-op sessions, and its length was about right for that. The campaign is utterly perfunctory, but I guess that's the intention, sort of a showcase for the faithful engine they've created. Feels like NWN's relationship with its campaign really.

Man, with the passing of the Queen and Gorbachev, that means all the world leaders featured in The Naked Gun are now deceased. End of an era.

The events of the game do occur over a span of about 20 years so you've got time yet.

Unpacking is probably a game I'd play a couple levels of, at most, were I to play it alone. And even then it's only because the game is on Game Pass. But I played it over the holidays collaboratively with my sister (the game has no co-op functionality at all, mind you, we were just handing off the controller between rooms) and it was oddly compelling to play it that way, talking about where things should go and how it relates to the silent player character. Ended up finishing it, I probably made a post about it from around the start of the year.