Humanoid

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.

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.