Humanoid

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.

The hardest fight in the Witcher series was the prologue fight in the castle courtyard in the second game. I wish Geralt could summon a horde of level 1 skeletons. Anyway, I bit on the CK3 expansion pass, despite the aggressively mediocre reviews. I can sort of rationalise it since the game itself didn't cost me anything on game pass. It's, eh, the same as before really. I'm largely indifferent to the Royal Court features since they're basically existing events in a new wrapper, with the one exception of the awful UI for managing artifacts. So I did the customary thing of randoming into some count, which landed me as an Armenian Apostolic two levels under the Abbasid Caliphate. Smelled like danger but in the end not really, Armenia is now the foremost superpower in the world, and like all CK3 games, that's the trigger to quit because there's nothing else to do. Other than produce the obligatory form of CK familial relationships:

I'd have no problem with inXile trying their hand at a single-character RPG, for the chief reason in that there'd be double the number of my preferred type of RPG being developed simultaneously. If that vehicle is Fallout instead of one of their homegrown properties, then so be it, it's potentially interesting regardless of whether it be set in the Wasteland, Fallout, or hell, the Age of Empires or Midtown Madness setting.

As someone with no compulsion to do optional content, the games play out more or less the same to me and they were both the best games of their respective years. There is some advantage in that the open world of W3 did give a visual leg-up though even if you didn't do any of the content, which gave the game a bit more variety in scenery besides narrow ravines. But ultimately the biggest difference was the addition of the dodge button to supplement the roll and it's the primary reason I consider it a better game. For similar reasons I don't really feel most criticisms towards CP2077 either, the open-world content is a non-factor in my evaluation of the game.

I use a mod to export my XCOM barracks to Excel, it's good stuff.

That eBay listing is for 8x8GB sticks, so that's not going to be practical. That said, depending on your case, you can increase the RAM clearance of the D15 by raising the fan somewhat. Just move the wire clip up a few notches until the fan is right up against the side panel. Hopefully that can widen your choices a little. 3200C14 will generally be expensive Samsung B-die, but Hynix-based 3600C16 is a decent alternative that comes reasonably decent at stock.

If any of those solutions sounds terrible, it's not the fault of the device outputting the digital signal - after all, they're just outputting a stream of 0s and 1s. It's the device on the other end that's doing all the heavy lifting and which determines audio quality. Buying another sound card would be throwing good money after bad, unless you use one of its analogue outputs. The primary role of a sound card is to take a digital signal and convert it to analogue (i.e. a DAC) and then amplify that signal to a level suitable for output (i.e. an amplifier). If you simply use it to output a digital signal, which optical, digital coax, USB and HDMI all are, then you're using exactly none of that functionality.

Digital output, whether it be coaxial or optical, means you're bypassing the onboard audio processing altogether and the audio quality will therefore be entirely dependent on what you have connected up at the other end of the cable. The entire notion of a sound card is made irrelevant by using a digital interconnect (other than sometimes you need to add the physical connector for cheap motherboards that don't have an optical out).

Yeah, going back to that 10 identical bandit encounter, half of them had strategic vantage points surrounding the party. So of course on their first turn they all climbed down from their strategic positions to rush me with their maces. I ran around them and claimed the wooden tower that two of them started on, and only after I blocked the ladders up did the game show that actually, all 10 bandits had heavy crossbows all along. Real facepalm moment, that.

Got ambushed by a set of dectuplet bandits, all with identical outfits, maces and beards which seemed a bit absurd. Had to use the box strat exploit of standing on a tower and blocking all the ladders up to stand a chance. So yeah, the balancing of random encounters is a bit wonky. On the plus side, the location design of the second major questing location is far more reasonable and interesting than the first location, and the fights seemed much more reasonable too. So in general the challenge seems okay now. Early on it was probably skewed a fair bit because we created the characters with more of a 3.5E mindset and have generally poor stats after taking the default rolls for all four characters. Stuff like there not being any skill points was a big shock, as well as learning that I should have been dual-wielding from level 1 with no supporting feats, etc.

I don't think any of my quibbles or issues with the game so far have anything to do with co-op, since I assume mechanically the campaign plays out exactly the same whether there be one, two or four people splitting the characters between them. Which is good in terms of making a stable co-op experience, but perhaps a little bad in terms of the issues being having around for a long time before co-op was even a twinkle in their eye.

Tried Solasta co-op, having never played the game before. Got squashed on the middle ("authentic" I think) difficulty. I'm going to blame low-level D&D blues for that but I also suspect that skipping a sidequest may have cost us an all-important level-up. Regardless, we're going to switch it down a notch next session. The dialogue system is also kinda silly with individual dialogue choices arbitrarily tied to to party slot. That is, the first choice is spoken by the first party member, and so forth. Besides that, my biggest gripe is probably the camera controls, which I don't see an option to customise. Getting the camera to auto-follow your unit(s) is particularly irritating because the input for doing so is at odds with the input to select multiple units. So for example, you already have multiple units selected, but the camera is not on auto-follow. You double-click a unit to set the auto-follow, but this means you've now only got one character selected. So now you need to drag a selection box to select everyone again. It's extraordinarily tedious to have to go through this ritual of double-click then box select every time I want to move, especially as the mode gets deactivated at the drop of a hat.

I need to go back and play MI1 and 2 huh? A few years ago I did the workaround to get the new Special Edition voice lines working with the old graphics (because the new graphics were horrifically animated) but I didn't actually get around to properly playing it and that setup was on an old laptop I've since given to my mum. Just need to do that again, I'm sure it'd take maybe 5 minutes to set up. Still massively welcome news of course, especially given that we're over a quarter of the way into the year and I've played zero new games so far. (As for superhero Diablo, wow, somehow someone's managed to combine my two least favourite things in media )

On a whim I started playing Sid Meier's Covert Action again. The odd thing about it for me is that it's not a game I play out of any real nostalgia: I didn't play it back when it released, not for the rest of the 90s, not in the 2000s. I think I only played it for the first time a little over 10 years ago. And yet it scratches that one itch that nothing else has managed to in all these decades: my need for Advanced Carmen Sandiego. So while the gameplay is actually pretty sub-par, the meta-layer of investigating all the links with actual pen and paper in hand is still extremely satisfying. A reimagining in something resembling the Hitman engine would be very welcome indeed.

I did an "Adventures of Naked Man" pastiche (inspired by a one-panel cartoon that was in the local newspaper at the time) with Morrowind on a previous iteration of the forum.

That juxtaposition made it seem like Roberta Williams was onboard to make the most sadistic Witcher game yet.

This trailer contains no useful information, but if it's anything like the previous game, it may be my game of the decade.

Oh wow, I didn't know co-op was even on the menu for Solasta. I don't know how fun controlling two characters each will be but definitely giving it a shot given it's on Game Pass. I get that co-op is an afterthought to many players, but for something like this, it turns a game I would never touch (given my long-standing position about party-based RPGs) into a must-try. (Meanwhile, Bloodstained still doesn't have it's co-op update, sheesh)

Content-wise no difference, but the trick to telling them apart is that the review has a watermark in the corner with the Gamespot or IGN logo.

In terms of shape, it's the original Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepad for me. As for the Playstation touchpad, I've never held the PS5 gamepad but the PS4 one had the issue that for all the limited functionality the touchpad added, it was cancelled out by the start and select button being rendered useless for use in any fast action context. They're tiny, poorly-positioned, minimal feedback, and just generally horrific - I'd expect better even from a MadCatz controller in the 90s. Furthermore, as I never did play a game that properly employed the touchpad, the result is a net loss. That said, it's a fairly minor complaint in the grand scheme of things and I'm not opposed to them trying things; it's just in the wrong position, size or shape. I won't get into the rest of the issues I have with it, as I've already done so at least a couple of times here. A bigger complaint I have with regard to game controllers is the designs of steering wheels controls being completely dictated by the consoles. No, it's not about the buttons being labelled like console controllers, that's irrelevant. It's that in assigning the mappings there's no consideration to how many controls actual normal cars have. The design of various flight controllers shows that speciality controllers don't need to be dumbed down in terms of inputs, but nope, standard console inputs only. Give me my indicator stalks, my high beams, my cruise control ...controls.