Humanoid

Praying the Bannerlord co-op mod isn't vapourware, it's something that for me would turn the game from an "ehhhh maybe" to "this is the best game released this year" material.

I have the original big box release of Mafia from 20 years ago. I've never played the game.

Steam claims I have 298 hours in Cook Serve Delicious 3, and that makes me look at the various numbers for all my other games with a lot more suspicion now. I doubt I even have 30 hours in the game, hell it's probably closer to 3 than to 30. My best guess is that it's a bug with Remote Play Together functionality.

Vacation by the Go-Go's. I'm not too familiar with the song but did think it sounded like Belinda Carlisle (thought it was Mad About You for a few moments there).

Two Point Campus has once again devolved into spamming random items in order to increase a meaningless "attractiveness" bar in order to even progress to the next level. You'd have thought the developers would have learned from the one biggest criticism of their previous game, but apparently not, as this idiocy persists. In the space of about two hours they've managed to just about completely wipe out any goodwill I had for the game.

I'm glad I don't have to cough up $80.95AUD then. Still, I'm willing to forgive a lot for the sake of co-op, so it may well be a live option eventually, whereas as a single-player game it'd be forgotten immediately. Maybe the poor reception will get it onto Game Pass sooner rather than later? (No idea if Deep Silver deals with Game Pass admittedly)

Man, I was just thinking that the CK3 DLC I've been playing hasn't been worth the purchase price. Evidently Paradox agrees. Yeah, just double the price of old, anaemic DLC, what's the worst that could happen? Feels like it's pretty much a skeleton crew running the game as it is, the pace of development, hell the pace of implementing trivial fixes, has been glacially slow. Has the Bloodlines 2 disaster hobbled the company that much?

Finished KeyWe. Cute game, but very short and with minimal replay value. Hell, it kind of makes you think there are more levels than there actually are, because the game presents you a calendar that starts in summer, and you go through that, autumn and winter and ...there's no spring. So the game is actually only 3/4 the length you might think it is. Fortunately we went through it with Steam Remote Play Together, so ~$20 for the two of us works out okay. Having to pay $20 each would have been a rip-off. It's a fairly simple setup where there are four basic types of minigame that are rotated through, and they're of variable quality, with various gimmicks added to them each time they come around. I recall this uneven quality of the levels being the main criticism of the game when it was released, and it's somewhat accurate. I felt the typing minigame was the weakest by some distance, but the other three - telegrams, mail sorting and parcel sorting - were of similar quality. The other thing that perhaps contributes to the lack of replay value is that the goals of each level are strictly limited to a few repetitions, e.g. for the typing minigame, you simply have to type three messages, and are scored on how fast you do so. It's over in a flash, unlike say, Overcooked, where there is a meta game of optimising your action economy to get a constant workflow going. Next game: Two Point Campus

It's all set up for the end user to tie some rope to the top bars and suspend the whole assembly in a vat of oil.

I recall now that I did attempt to play IWD2 with a party of two back in the day. Got pretty far before it became too hard, so I added two more party members to finish up the second half of the game. Both D:OS games I played in co-op Lone Wolf mode. BG3 unfortunately lacks that functionality (at least it did the last time I checked) so it had to be a 2x2 setup. In For The King we traded off the third character slot every session. For PoE2, I haven't tried it since turn-based mode was added. When it was new, I attempted a Story Mode difficulty playthrough but it turns out Story Mode is actually still too hard if you play through with the AI controlling everything and - probably the biggest factor - you never equip any gear beyond the starting gear. Having to go through the rigmarole of character creation affects things too. I got through Shadowrun Returns alright for example, but Wasteland 2 never got off the ground because by the time I finished creating my party, I no longer had the energy to play.

Yeah, simply modding in a different combat system isn't going to be enough. Besides the raw amount of tedious combat, which would be tedious regardless of combat system, basically these days the biggest number of party members I can stand to control is probably ...two. I don't imagine any old RPG can be realistically adapted like that. But two more for a co-op partner makes four and that's basically the only reason I find games like Larian's or Solasta playable. Am I a Nardgrog or something like that? Probably. The alternative for larger parties would probably be a system designed from the ground up such that not only do you not *have to* control your party members, but you *cannot* do so. It sort of mirrors my position on self-driving cars actually: I don't want a car that *can* drive itself, I want one where it *must* drive itself.

a rock > rusty nails in your scrotum > slow, agonizing death by necrotizing fasciitis > IE games I loved (most of) them once upon a time, but I cannot and will not ever play them again. Unless they're remade with smaller parties with turn-based mechanics.

She was our only bulwark against the idiocy of the 2E druid XP table.

I think of The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Plenty of inspiration to be had from the wider Star Wars canon. ... Somehow Malak returned

Huh, I had no idea Viconia was in BG1 (unless that's an EE thing).

Because I didn't get around to it when it was new. Trying it only once the more recent, shinier Infinity Engine games were out meant that it was a huge downgrade from the likes of BG2, PS:T and IWD2 (never played IWD1 either) and I couldn't be bothered sticking with it. I'm not sure if the various mods to improve the resolution and other QoL changes were out at the time. I'm sure it's a lot more playable these days, but it's too late because I'm just done with RTwP, and with big party-based (but single-player) RPGs in general.

I'm down for some Xancest. (I actually have no idea who Xan or most BG1-exclusive NPCs are since I quit about two screens out of Candlekeep) ________ EDIT: Polished off Solasta. I have nothing of interest to say about its closing stages, it just is.

I ended up "solving" my CK3 de jure drift problem ...by maximising my de jure drift. The size of my primary kingdom of Galicia was too far gone to ever be able to realistically convert it: hell, large swathes of Morocco and southern France are now fully parts of Galicia. So instead of trying to do anything about that, I encouraged it by manually trying to shrink the Kingdom of Andalusia to be as small as possible, then once it was down to a measly eight counties I had pre-converted to my culture, I would be able to finally end this silly struggle. But there was another stupid problem in that I needed to be in the Hostility phase to be able to end it, and one such phase had just concluded. It's like if I need to do something by midnight, but it's now 1:00 AM and I need to wait out the entire day for midnight to roll around again. Except the problem with that analogy is that progress to the next phase is dependent on actions by all characters involved - specifically hostile actions. And with full control of the region established amidst centuries of peace, that meant such progress was glacially slow. So began a long and stupid grinding phase, where essentially my only valid hostile actions were to upgrade every single castle in Spain over and over (worth 3 points), and to turn full puritan, spying on everyone to expose their love affairs and other secrets (worth 10 points). I need 1000 points to advance one phase. And I had to do this cycle twice over to get into the correct phase, so that's 2000 points required from spamming those actions. The game started in the year 867. I had essentially "won" by around 1040. It then took until around 1260, mostly sitting around waiting for progress bars to complete, for this torture to finally be over. So yeah, that's Fate of Iberia. The struggle system has potential in that it's an interesting journey, turning the Reconquista into more than just Holy War spam like it used to be. But the destination is idiotically arbitrary, requiring the player to jump through a series of hoops that bear little relation to sensible gameplay, and instead turn it into a grind-fest of nonsensical actions. I suppose that's better than the other way around, in that I imagine either modders or a future patch can fairly easily update the "win" condition to be less stupid, and that the mechanical changes that lead up to it are in fairly servicable condition. I don't necessarily think I'll ever play this particular struggle ever again, but if they ever port the system to other regions of the game, then it's fairly clear what needs to be improved.

Yeah, I do make sure to appoint the right culture dukes under me, but the game's been running for 200 years with probably 100 of them under my iron rule - hasn't happened yet. I mean it has the diagonal shading indicating a transition period but no luck yet with actual flipping. Waiting for them to conquer Francia on my behalf would probably be quicker. It's always been weird how it takes the player as long to convert the religion of their holdings as it is their culture, but for vassals the religion switch is almost instantaneous, partly because of the weird loophole where a converting ruler can instantaneously flip everyone with them, but I swear there's another factor at play too.

Ugh, the recent patch seems to have messed with Solasta's behaviour when tabbed out. Used to be I could freely do it while my co-op partner was taking their turn, but now doing so causes the game to have a seizure and stop responding until a few seconds after I tab back in. And it makes the Alt key stick until I hit Alt again too, so instead of moving I just spam waypoints on the map. The game has always had some odd behaviours with task switching, mind you. Like graphically it proceeds just fine while you're elsewhere, but the voice lines don't trigger until you're back, which if you're in a cutscene usually results in multiple characters talking over each other. On the plus side, the game actually has an icon in the Xbox app now, instead of a generic placeholder that it's had forever.

Between having the drift which actually benefits me, versus hobbling myself in order to achieve some convoluted "victory" condition, I'll take the former every time. I've barely gotten out of Confederate Partition, and am a looooong way away from anything better than standard Partition so creating the other kingdoms is a no-go, and I don't like to game succession *that* much with the usual tricks like disinheriting kids embracing celibacy, legitimising bastards, etc. I suppose my point in general is that it seems to be an oversight when a natural sort of playthrough ends up in a stalemate like this. There should probably be more options to end the struggle, covering more eventual game states.

So Fate of Iberia has this stupid catch-22 situation where completing the Reconquista - i.e. the resolving struggle system the DLC introduces and forming the Empire of Hispania, is tied to culture in your primary Kingdom. Actually there are three possible resolutions to the conflict, but the following explains how three options rapidly dwindled down to one, and then to none: 1) Peace and harmony and sunshine and rainbows and stuff. The condition for this one is to ally with everyone else in the region, which technically I fulfil because I am the only kingdom in the region. But I'm not eligible because there is a limit of 50% ownership of the region, thus having 100% ownership disqualifies me. 2) Calling it a draw. Once again there's a limit of 50% ownership, but now it applies to all rulers. Basically completely Balkanise the region and ensure everyone remains weak. This is a bizarre ending that like all fair compromises leaves absolutely no one happy. So with those two options out, I should be aiming for the third and final ending condition right? Well it's... 3) Domination. Which you'd think conquering the entire Iberian peninsula would qualify as. But the catch is, you must also establish a monoculture in your primary Kingdom. So as Galicia I must convert all counties in De Jure Galicia to the same culture. Except there's a problem: it takes 8 years to convert one county's culture, and you can only convert one at a time. Meanwhile, De Jure drift means adjacent counties gradually become part of the Kingdom. The maths end up working like this: In 100 years, I'll be able to flip 12 counties. Meanwhile, in those same 100 years, 20 more counties are scheduled to join the Kingdom and every single one of them will need to be flipped. So at the end of it, I'll actually have achieved negative progress towards the goal. Yeah... (Of course there's ultimately a finite number of counties in Iberia, but then there's also a finite number of years the game will run for, and I'm not sure that's a race I can win) ___________ So that's Fate of Iberia. I've essentially soft-locked myself from completing the objective of the DLC. True to the law of unintended consequences, it seems that what it's achieved is to lock out the creation of the Empire of Hispania - which requires resolving the Iberian Struggle - and anyone playing in the region is simply better off creating a custom Empire, or perhaps a neighbouring one like Francia instead, which is much, much easier. But for those sensible players, the icon in the bottom corner will remain, constantly and pointlessly cycling between phases of the struggle, an eternal reminder of the Quixotic task they set out to accomplish.

So I thought I'd finally try out the Fate of Iberia DLC for CK3. Ironically my prep game that I started prior to the DLC launch made me take a break from the game for a while and I haven't felt the pull to play it again until now. I started a game in Navarre and played for several hours, almost 150 ingame years, wondering why so little seemed different. It turns out, uh, I haven't installed the DLC. I own it, but I didn't install it. The free patch changes that shipped alongside the DLC made me think it was, but nope. Oh well, I'd say I'd wasted my time, but then I got attritioned down by the huge Umayyad blob as is usual for the 867 Iberia start, so the game was almost over anyway even if I didn't realise my mistake.

Yeah, I'm slowly getting through it in co-op, indeed very slowly because one or two sessions a week of 2-3 hours each doesn't get you far. But the design of the campaign feels very perfunctory, I daresay similar to how NWN1's was. And I can't help but feel it's getting worse as the game goes on, my last main story quest feeling like I'm just being guided from room to room and being told to fight whoever is in it. Even any notion of setup has been discarded, the last two questlines I remember simply teleported the party into a small room, the inevitable fight against the villain of the week plus a few random mooks starts after a couple throwaway lines of dialogue, quest ends, onto the next quest. In that context even the dungeon crawling part no longer holds, it's feeling closer to a few amateurishly cobbled together set pieces now. All sense of place has been lost. This may be because I'm fairly close to the end, probably. I think we've got maybe 5 of the 7 gems?