Humanoid

I did get maybe around 30-40 hours out of FO4, and I never even engaged with the settlement mechanic. It was only natural to not do so: I mean, the way the game sets it up, you've just set off on your big quest, and in the first town you go to, you meet some NPCs and you're supposed to go with them back to where you started? How does that structure even make the slightest sense narratively? It'd be like going straight back to the Vault after reaching Shady Sands in FO1. So yeah, I never went back so I never even learned how the base building even worked. Doesn't help I think that as a non-American, I can't think of a single thing about Boston other than it exists. So there was no sense of place at all as I trekked through what was for me, the ruins of a completely generic city. So much so that my entire experience was basically ended within a few hours of leaving Diamond City (which was okay, the best part of the game's low standards) because all I could see besides Diamond City was generic bombed out ruins. Just the traditional Bethesda thing of misunderstanding Fallout and setting it as if it was 20 years after the bombs fell, and not 200.

I really can't predict whether I'll like a Bethesda game prior to actually trying each as it arrives. So it's fortunate that I won't have to pay for the privilege of trying Starfield. I'd give Morrowind and Skyrim a low B, Fallouts 3 and 4 a D, and Oblivion an F.

Double post, but I guess I'll split out the non-RL2 stuff here. Started playing Shredder's Revenge, which is fortunately on Game Pass because it'd be a very marginal standalone purchase. As I believe I've said before back when first footage of the game was first revealed, I had a pretty deep sense of uncanny valley with this game, and that hasn't changed with the full release. It's like, these are the Turtles I grew up with, only, these aren't really the Turtles I grew up with - I much prefer the look of the classic Turtles in Time. The new voice actors, while unavoidable, contribute to this feeling as well. In terms of gameplay, I haven't delved into the more complex elements of the fighting just yet, so mostly playing it like a primitive two-button brawler using a combination of attacking, jumping and dashing alone. I'll look into the provided in-game tutorial when we're not in a hurry. It feels solid enough, other than impacts perhaps lacking a bit of oomph. Also had a pretty annoying bug where during a dual boss fight, one of them just vanished from my screen, but remained on my (online) co-op partner's screen. Couldn't hit or be hit by the invisible boss directly, except when he shoots projectiles, which very much can hit me.

"Finished" Rogue Legacy 2, and by that, I mean I cleared the world ten times over to see all the content. Well, almost all the content. Technically it can be done in seven clears, because each iteration of New Game+ unlocks one "Prime" (hard mode) boss. But I'm a fairly cautious, thorough player, so I stuck to full clears instead of beelining bosses for quick clears, and as a result I tended to stay 50-100 levels ahead of the level curve. The good news is that the core gameplay is fundamentally good and I have no notable complaints about it. But as with all games I like, I'm a lot more critical of the problems it does have, which are all at the meta level of the game, and here are some I found particularly glaring. 1) The "upgrades" system, i.e. the castle building money sink that serves as the game's tech tree. It's incredibly cluttered yet somehow also incredibly bland. Here's a picture of the fully unlocked castle: Besides the incredibly high numbers and the absolutely packed grid that obscures everything, my biggest complaint would be the actual upgrades themselves. Take the five brain icons at the right side of the grid. Three of them act identically, where each point in brains increases your Focus stat by one. What does Focus do? It increases the damage your spell crits do. Then there's the brain icon with the little plus sign on it. What does that one do? It ...increases the damage your spell crits do. But for some reason it does so directly instead of by increasing your focus. Just... why? Never mind the fact that Focus itself is a trap for new players, it's a stat you should disregard entirely because spell crits (and indeed crits in general) aren't a meaningful mechanic for your first few playthroughs. Except that you do have to put one point in each of those tiles because doing so unlocks an adjacent tile. However you don't know what it'll be without looking up the wiki, and it may be something incredibly important like unlocking a new class, or it may be completely useless like being a more expensive duplicate of the thing you just bought. 2) Scar challenges. These are sort of preset scenarios where you might, say, re-fight a boss with a twist, or complete some platforming challenge within a time limit. I have quite a few issues with how this is done. These challenges completely ignore your progression, i.e. the "lite" part in rogue-lite, and instead hard-code your level and available upgrades. Used to having nice things like increased movement speed, extra double jumps, all that good stuff? Nope, it's all ripped away from you so despite 95% of your time playing with those upgrades, you're suddenly thrust into a fight with half your normal movement speed, and none of the usual movement utility skills you've gotten used to. There's a limited handicap system you can use that crudely scales your health and damage (for combat challenges) or gives you a few seconds of extra time (for platforming challenges) but they do nothing to address the feeling of playing with your hands tied behind your back. So with such a crappy system it might seem odd that my other main complaint is how hard it is to access. From your home base, you have to enter a building, jump up to the relevant NPC, navigate a poorly designed menu, start the challenge, tediously walk in and out of three separate rooms which each house a choice of two random "relics" (i.e. combat upgrades), click away the pop-up explaining what the relic you've chosen does, then manually enter the boss room proper. Just let me retry the challenge again without the song and dance, dammit. Furthermore, this functionality is locked out completely on the first character you use each time you start a new New Game+, so you have to intentionally die at least once. This is particularly egregious because these challenges - the combat ones at least - are designed such that you're forced to do them with multiple classes to actually get the reward. Got a perfect score on one with your mage? Well good for you, you get *nothing* until you do the same fight with several other classes such that your cumulative score is enough to reach the bronze/silver/gold thresholds. 3) The horrendous equipment UI. It's incredibly basic and refuses to show the information you actually need in terms of selection your loadout. The UI for purchasing gear and equipping it is one and the same, and it's remarkably inadequate for both. On the purchasing side, you have no way of knowing what tier of equipment you've unlocked until you've purchased the immediately preceding item. Have I unlocked the recipe for Leather Weapon (don't ask)+2? The only way of knowing is to first purchase Leather Weapon+1 and then seeing if the upgrade button is available next to it. And in terms of unlocking gear in the first place, there's a bit of a trap in that unlocking a higher tier of gear can be an act of self-sabotage. Hell, the NPC outright tells you to buy the unlock to get +1 gear immediately, but it's not necessarily good advice. You have the default Leather gear but have yet to find the Obsidian stuff? Well have fun having your drops diluted by Leather+1 instead of that more advanced stuff you wanted. In terms of equipping gear, it's not much better either. Notably while you have a maximum encumbrance limit that's shown straightforwardly enough, it's actually fairly key to know there are multiple soft limits before you hit that hard cap, you gain significant bonuses by "travelling light", i.e. progressive bonuses for only carrying 20/40/60% of your hard limit. Or it may be 21%/42%/63%. Or 24%/48%/72%, etc, depending on upgrades you've unlocked. But all you get in the UI is the straight hard cap and where you are in relation to it, so the game might tell you you're at 640/870 weight and leave you to figure out the rest for yourself. Armour rating is another trap where you have no way of knowing how much armour is enough, and how much is too much. By default you can only block 35% of the damage from a given hit (though it may be 39%/43%/etc with upgrades). Well, how hard can the enemies hit for? After all, if no enemy hits for more than 1000 damage, then having more than 350 armour is literally useless. So how hard do enemies hit in this particular iteration of New Game+? Have fun figuring that out.

I do like quite a few of the classes, but some I've only used once admittedly. - Top five for me so far, in no particular order, are Fighter, Boxer, Chef, Valkyrie and Duellist. Versatile and no obvious weaknesses that make me wish I'd taken something else. - Barbarian, Lancer, Ronin and Assassin are a step below in my experience so far. A common theme between them is that their regular weapon attacks are a bit unusual, more than just the super responsive see-thing-hit-thing of the above classes (except Chef who is a bit slow). - I've played the ranged classes the least so take my opinions on them lightly. I had an awful time (once each) with the extraordinarily gimmicky duo of Pirate and Bard. Mage is disappointing because they have no defining characteristic and you may as well just play Astromancer who is simply a better mage. Ranger and Gunslinger are the two classes in the game where you have to aim every shot, and I don't have the patience to play like that at the moment. For context I've just taken down the fifth boss, so I've now seen all the regularly accessible zones.

Decided to stop quibbling so much over $20 and bought Rogue Legacy 2 with the stacking discounts on EGS. I've played it for like 20 hours over the past three days so I can say well worth it. Even if I do suck at precision movement and barely ever remember to use anything but my basic attack. Not also being able to play it on the Xbox when I want to is unfortunate but it's the type of game I wouldn't mind double dipping on a year or two down the line. I did try to install it on my NUC but it won't launch, I imagine because integrated graphics are good enough even on a primarily 2D game, figures.

Yeah, not their fault obviously but not even knowing when a game will release there until it does hurts somewhat. Compare with say, Epic Store exclusivity where even if someone is ardently against them, they know exactly when that exclusivity ends. Me, I have a pretty big itch to play Rogue Legacy 2. But I want it either on GOG, or on Microsoft Store with Play Anywhere support. I might even have gambled on Play Anywhere being added eventually if it was purchasable for PC from Microsoft, but nope. That said, $22.50AUD on EGS (vs $36AUD on Steam) is at least getting close enough to where double dipping in the future wouldn't hurt *that* much.

If the question was whether to pay for it, then I'd say CK3 is still pretty undercooked, but given it's on Game Pass, give it a try. The DLC at this stage is not particularly impactful and can be safely ignored. _________ Think I'm done with Football Manager for now. I won the Premier League once (by a solitary point) and with that done, it got to a point where I was well and truly sick of the match engine and just used auto-resolve for all matches thereafter. This approach did well enough, and getting through a few off-seasons worth of recruitment in rapid succession improved the squad so much that the league is an automatic win by ~20 points each season, and yielded a Champions League trophy too. Not the way the game was intended to be played, so I guess it's now Football Director of Football instead of Football Manager. The year is 2036 I believe, and the game is down to under 5% real players now, sold off my last one about a year ago. So this raises an interesting philosophical question: is it considered more successful to, say, micromanage for a full season and win one championship, or to speed through four seasons in the same amount of real-world time and win three out of four championships? i.e. success rate per opportunity, or success rate per unit time?

I must have played the game before the box was implemented, whatever the hell it is. Seeing the video title I thought it was in reference to that Peter Molyneux scam or somesuch. What I don't get is that this is the same developer who made it so that at the end of Act 1 in their previous game, they just instakilled all potential party members in the game except the ones you've explicitly put into your party, presumably because they didn't want to leave any loose ends.

Hmm, the Heart of Russia expansion for Euro Truck Sim 2 has been shelved indefinitely. Now fans will be even more regretful that they spent so much time working on this rather than filling that giant Yugoslavia-shaped hole in the map instead.

I have a weird moral dilemma in Football Manager, where I accidentally save-scummed due to a crash. Some sort of memory leak caused the game to terminate near the end of the final match of the season, which I was about to lose (a likely story right?) and was happy to lose really. With monthly autosaves that still set me back several matches, and there's no way in hell that I would play through all of that manually. So I set holiday mode (autoplay) until the end of the season and went to do something else. Anyway, when the game crashed I'd won the league* already in the previous matchweek so that's not the issue. The AI holiday manager managed to do the same - with better wins ironically. But it comfortably outperformed me in Europe, "earning" me an undeserved Europa League runners-up medal. So, uh, putting aside the embarrassment of the autopilot manager being a fair bit more competent than me, I feel the save is a bit tainted now. But I also am not going to double-down and keep save-scumming until I replicate my previous results exactly. So I stopped playing and am going to have to sleep on it at the very least. (* With Feyenoord that is, having made the controversial decision to switch between cross-town rivals at the start of the season, so not some absurd overachievement. And the team that was about to beat me in the final match was my old team Excelsior, so there's a bit of Karma there, ignoring the fact that I was happy for them to win and guarantee their survival in the top league. In the save-scummed version they ended up having to go to a relegation playoff but fortunately they survived that.)

Eyy, the real life Excelsior just got promoted to the Eredivisie (top Dutch league) the same year I did it in Football Manager. Heard it was a mad game, levelled it from 0-3 down to get into extra time, then fell behind again, equalised, then won 8-7 on penalties. But that's off-topic I suppose. As for the video game, I went and did some research instead of just winging it and was a bit disappointed with what I found, mechanically speaking. Seems that as many times before in the history of the series, the key to success is simply stacking the team with Pace, Acceleration, and Dribbling. Sometimes it's better to not know I guess, because knowing how shallow things are behind the scenes can certainly impact what satisfaction you get from winning. Ah well. So enough with that, time to dive into the latest Euro Truck Sim 2 patch, and its long-awaited revamp of Austria. Truth be told, I don't remember much about how the old Austrian cities looked, because the horrible, poorly-signed highways and prefab buildings made it deathly dull to drive though, and I'd always take a detour through France when driving between Italy and Scandinavia (my two favourite regions of the game). Started by driving to Innsbruck which is lovely, if confusing to navigate. Then while fumbling with the UI, I accidentally took a driver-for-hire job instead of a regular job, which meant I drove an entry level truck to Klagenfurt instead of my shiny new 2021 state-of-the-art DAF. It's funny, while driving it the thing that most caught my attention and made me cringe was the spectacularly cheap-looking steering wheel. Kinda made me feel icky imagining how sticky and unpleasant holding it would be, now that's immersion.

Y'know, I think I registered on the BIS forums back in June of 2002, and I have never actually started a thread on that forum or any of its successors. But now it looks as if I have, even if I wasn't actually responsible for it. So after 19 years and 11 months, the streak is broken, thanks Tepid. Anyway, continuing on with the FM21 Touch adventure. I've now played 3-4 seasons in the Eredivisie, sticking with Excelsior. To be fair, only one other club has tried to poach me away, and I turned them down as they were a mid-table side, a distinctly sideways move despite them offering to triple my wages. I wish the game would let you do stuff with your personal money, like buy a Ferrari or something. That said, it's hard going because it takes a long time for a yo-yo club to improve their finances enough to compete with the established top division club. Especially true when in two seasons running, the board decides to upgrade the stadium instead of allowing any meaningful transfer budget. Actually, worse than the transfer budget is the wage budget - I'm trying to play a "realistic" game with proper delegation of responsibilities, i.e. scouts and the Director of Football find me players instead of me trawling the database looking at hard numbers. But there's a problem in that the game is essentially set up to find what it thinks are an appropriate level of ability without regard to finances. So the vast majority of recommendations are for players who cost double my entire transfer kitty, and who demand triple the maximum wage I can afford to pay them. Thanks guys, very helpful. Finally, being in a league with VAR for the first time exposes the game's rather primitive implementation of it. Offside call? Always offside. Penalty call? Always a penalty unless it's a question of whether the foul was in the box, in which case it's always outside. And for those penalty calls, play is always stopped, and the ref always jogs slowly to the pitchside monitor to review it himself. I might think the real-life implementation of VAR leaves a lot to be desired, but Football Manager takes it to the next level of pointless awfulness. The sad thing of course is that FM Touch has now been discontinued, so I can't even look forward to future improvements to the system, once they get it right in 5-10 years. If I ever start a new game I might just do one of those where I use Instant Result for every match.

I have Stellaris installed, and have had for several years. Haven't played it since within a month or two of its original launch. I've even added several DLCs to it via Humble Bundles since then, but still have no particular intention to play it.

Now that the real-life football season is over, I can feel comfortable playing Football Manager again - specifically FM21 Touch. I'd forgotten where I was, having last played it the month that it was an Amazon Prime freebie, but turns out I'm manager of Excelsior in the Dutch second division, around a couple months in. Anyway, being a very hands-off manager, and this being the Touch version, I can motor through a season pretty fast, and I finished up the season in 2-3 days of play. Secured promotion by finished third place in the league, as while only the top two automatically promote, one was the Ajax youth team who are ineligible for promotion. Then I checked my staff at the end of the season to see who I could promote ...turns out I went through the entire season without an Assistant Manager. Umm, I don't know how that happened. Did he retire or get poached? Was no one there in the role to begin with? Who was giving me all my squad selection advice and handling training? It's quite the mystary.

How about people who own them but wish they didn't?

As a kid I would have expected the 21st century conversation to be about where to park my flying car, yet sadly here we are, still tethered to the ground.

Touche. Though in all seriousness it's more because they simply don't exist, rather than being occupied. It might not matter for something like GTA or Saints Row where you tend to make explosive exits from your vehicle, but even in Saints Row I followed the road rules most of the time. Like, the only carpark I actually remember is outside the club that's central to the main plot ...and it doesn't work properly because there are some invisible walls in it. The Witcher 3 was pretty decent about providing horse parking at inns I think?

It sounds silly but I avoided driving simply because of the lack of anywhere to park. It's really immersion-breaking to just get out of the car in the middle of the street, so driving feels heavily disincentivised. Please, widen the streets and give us curbside parking. Yeah, it's probably just the Truck Sim driver in me talking. Still waiting for the imminent 1.44 patch for that which revamps the heavily outdated Austria map.

I've never heard of Redfall before, and after looking it up, I would have been happy it remained that way.

Sure, but we know the lady doth love a 4080Ti or something else of that calibre.

They're not fundamentally different in terms of airflow so I probably still wouldn't do it. But a hard requirement for a optical drive makes things messy, because cases that still have the 5.25" bay tend more towards the budget end. The Cooler Master NR600 is an example of a decent case with optical bay, but Cooler Master in general have really been dragging their feet in terms of adding USB-C ports. Of course, you could get the Define 7 and just remove the door, but dunno if that's too ugly of a solution. Maybe settle for an external 5.25" enclosure (instead of buying a complete external drive)?

The Antec is essentially a budget version of the Fractal Design Define 7. Besides better build quality in general, it adds niceties such as USB-C, and being able to switch which way the door swings open. Since you're pretty partial to high-power components, I would expect you to want to run with the door open every time you play a system intensive game, so be sure you're okay with it possibly getting in the way. Otherwise I'd just grab a Meshify 2 instead, which is based on the same skeleton, but just has a standard mesh front, and there's a windowless version. There's also a compact version if the two 3.5" drive bays are sufficient for you. (Note: do not get the Define 7 Compact, because unlike the full-sized version, it does not have a door. The solid front panel is permanent and therefore it's unsuitable for high-power builds.)

If I did, I'd never have played it. Never liked NWN, though admittedly I never played the supposedly superior expansions, but I'm okay with the first Witcher. It's a little weird perhaps then that the only NWN campaign I ended up playing for more than a couple of hours is SoZ.

I get by but that's largely because it's not a game designed around challenge, so I can go throughout an entire campaign completely neglecting things like the fact I have to equip my gear manually, that I can manually choose research, that I can hand out useful court titles, etc, and not notice a difference.