Humanoid

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.

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.