Humanoid

Yeah, probably healthier for me too not to be too cynical. It helps as well that despite their financial might, Microsoft are the smaller player in games than the likes of Valve and Sony, so it doesn't feel like I'm tipping the scales towards (to mix metaphors) where they're already leaning.

Spencer is so good at making positive sounds that my worry becomes that he's in danger of being promoted outside the gaming division. The good PR may be all smoke and mirrors of course, but it kinda does show how it's really not that hard to look like a good guy compared to the industry standard. ...and it also shows how easily I could find myself being swayed by smooth words. I have to admit I sometimes have difficulty reconciling my position regarding the danger of growing monopolies in this space against outcomes that so far have been largely positive for me as a consumer.

The Instant Result button is there for a reason.

I was just thinking to myself that it might be time to get a new edition of Football Manager Touch for six years, the last version I own being 2017. It's been a frustrating time for the past couple of years because Game Pass included the full-fat versions of 2020 and 2021 which is far too bloated for my tastes, and the overly stripped-down Xbox 2021 edition (that can be played on PC but has some critical limitations like a 30 season limit and no ability to import any external files). The middle-of-the-road Touch version (formerly Classic version) was always the happy medium for me since its introduction. Well, scratch that plan, because Touch has been discontinued. In name it exists for the Nintendo Switch only, but that's just because I presume Nintendo wouldn't like a game called "Football Manager Xbox Edition" on their eStore: it's stripped back just as badly, if not moreso. I wonder if this is the end of the road for me and the franchise because it means going forward they offer nothing that's in my wheelhouse. Which is doubly disappointing because I was hopeful of some major changes on the horizon when they announced that women's football would be added within the next few years, which felt like the first attempt at major innovation in years.

Hey, I asked Black Isle for a combatless RPG back when I registered in 2002. I'll take it.

I'm led to believe that once someone from Japan enters adulthood, they enter an office building wherein they will live out the remainder of their lives.

Bethesda have a 40% hit rate for me, which isn't great if I had to pay for any future Bethesda games. Feels kind of dirty admitting since I dislike companies getting too dominant in their field, but thank goodness for Microsoft splashing the cash.

It's never going to be the primary attraction for me, but I kinda see the value in the open world aspect of some games, being essentially an alternate game mode that can help extract value from an otherwise uninteresting game. I will never acknowledge there being any value in collectibles and achievements though, screw those. 😛 It doesn't have to be open world as such, the alternate game mode can take any form. Just like I had next to no interest in completing the core levels in Super Monkey Ball 2, but got pretty much all my value from that game from the minigame mode (particularly Monkey Target🎯).

I'd chime in regarding FO4's base building content but I never made it that far into the game. Like most, I didn't like the premise of the main plot, but I earnestly made an attempt to follow it by beelining it to Diamond City instead of the seemingly bizarre intended route of pausing your search to instead backtrack and help some cosplayers build a playfort. So it's perhaps ironic that by following the plot I ended up "missing out" on one of the big selling points. Anyway, some of the miniquests in Diamond City were a decent enough diversion to keep playing, but pretty much as soon as those dried up and I had to explore a generic bombed-out city, I lost interest completely. Perhaps the setting contributed to. Like, as someone who's never been to the US, I can't think of a single notable thing about Boston. I think the Bee Gees sang about it once?

I don't see how Triangle Strategy is any more weird a name than Tactics Ogre and Octopath anyway.

I was thinking more Pearl Harbor, as war movies go.

My best times with Darkest Dungeon 1 were when it was in Early Access so I think I'll repeat the trick here. Guess I'm installing the EGS client for the first time ever. I do have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the game in that it has a *lot* of mechanics I dislike and disagree with the implementation of, but very much appreciate that modding said mechanics was fairly trivial, with most of it stored in plain text files.

Looks like more of the same to me. Which is not a bad thing.

DKC2 lacked the little/large buddy dynamic that actually had gameplay implications when it came to dealing with enemies. Then DKC3 went about re-implementing it in the worst possible way with characters the average player would feel nothing for. ...but at least it wasn't DK64.

That's what you get for buying a Gravis Ultrasound or Pro Audio Spectrum.

As a career rogue, to be thrown into a starting dungeon filled with enemies completely immune to sneak attacks was not an experience I was prepared to suffer and I abandoned the game pretty quick. So in the end, MoTB was a victim of DnD rules for me. But I tried.

I only tried BG1 after BG2, and I got a couple screens out of Candlekeep before I got bored and abandoned ship. And I didn't even hate party-based RPGs back then! At a guess I probably got somewhere between a third and halfway through NWN, but I remember absolutely none of it. I even bought the expansions because everyone said it was much improved but I don't think I even started either of them. The crazy thing perhaps is that the only NWN game I properly played was SoZ, where I quit after I cleared the path to the final location, so like 95-99% through (depending if it would have been a final dungeon or just one boss fight). That's a weird habit of mine though, and one I've retained: this year alone I've stopped my Cyberpunk playthrough, an XCOM Long War campaign and a vanilla JA2 campaign all at about 99% done. And the latter I've never even completed officially before. But I just cleared up the palace map and just needed to assault the bunker but couldn't be bothered.

Can't name my first game, it'd have been one of the random games on the family PC. Most likely it'd have been one of Space Invaders (or a clone), Alley Cat, Pitstop 2, or Winter Games. The PC gaming habit didn't really go past that at the time as we got a NES thereafter, though I remember regularly watching my cousin play some SSI Gold Box games.

People yammering on about Persona 5 was one of the reasons I gave PS4 a chance in the first place (my first and only Sony console thus far). I gave it three attempts in 2-3 years but never got out of the first dungeon. I think in the end my most-played title on it was Pro Evolution Soccer, which I could have played on any other platform. 😕

Hi! I didn't think there'd ever be a console where I own fewer games for it than I did for the N64, but somehow the PS4P managed that.

Knocked over every single level in the Overcooked series (in All You Can Eat guise) over the past couple weeks in two-player mode. Previously over the past five year it'd mostly been a three/four-player experience over the holidays but it's just too hard to get everyone together now and figured it was time to see everything through. I know there have been quite a few complaints about the multiplayer performance/reliability for the game, and indeed there was one day where we couldn't connect at all and had to resort to Steam Remote Play. But overall it was a generally satisfactory experience, even if I'd never be able to tell the graphical difference to the original release in a blind test. Other than that, we're also trying the new Age of Empires 2 co-op campaigns. As with the original release, the missions are of pretty uneven quality and I doubt that will ever change, but it's a decent enough change of pace.

On Game Pass - ✅

I tried the previous game, Berseria, about a year ago. The game got worse and worse as more party members forcibly joined. Finally quit when the oh-so-kooky mage girl formally joined up. The whole thing was Mood Whiplash, The Game. And the time before I quit wasn't enough to even learn how the combat system worked. That said, it was played in co-op so combat was just chaos anyway, no time to stop and figure things out.

Everyone seemed young on that brief glimpse we got of the portrait page, it'd make me think it was a prequel but MD is there and he was meant to be a rookie in JA2. Hmm. EDIT: And Ivan's English is way too good.

Driving through Valencia in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and while I normally have full confidence in SCS Software's meticulous research, I'm somewhat doubtful that this is correct Spanish.