Humanoid

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.

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.