Humanoid

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.

Over here our TVs kinda transitioned from centimetres to inches around the time plasma supplanted CRTs. Which might be a little backwards but it at least unified the TV world with the monitor world (which has used inches for as long as I remember).

As long as her favourite one isn't Rebel Assault it's fine.

I had the same complaint less than a week ago. Fortunately there is a rather prosaically named mod "No World Congress" which I promptly installed. I imagine this disables Diplomatic Victory as a side effect, which I consider a feature as it's the most idiotically implemented victory condition in the history of the series. And yeah, "it's alright" is my reaction to it too. I suspect that it won't last beyond this month and that I'll return to Civ 4 in due time.

Yeah, even as someone who does not like Star Wars at all, I liked KoTOR and its successors well enough. Sure it was during the early days where going full 3D meant heavy compromises, but mechanically it was functional, and I liked the heavy focus on dialogue, as silly as the few canned lines of alien speech endlessly repeating was. Besides, it's not like we had any other option back then for a spiritual successor to the IE games - frankly I would have played whatever BioWare released regardless of the setting at the time.

The stealth system is making no sense to me. I'm lockpicking all the doors in the tutorial area but doing so puts the relevant NPC on alert permanently, not that there are any consequences to being caught (as far as I know). And yeah, when I heard people say that stealth was broken, I thought maybe it'd be like Skyrim, surely it can't be any easier than that. Welp, the stealth detection radius is about half a metre and is non-directional. I'm completely baffled by this design. EDIT: I was wrong, the alert status does go away eventually, after like 10 minutes real time. This could get tedious pretty quick... EDIT2: Leaving the zone and returning has no apparent effect.

Yes, the charge system in base Civ 6 really did alleviate most of the tedium and I was quite pleased with that. It's just that Gathering Storm basically returns them to the status of the previous games where you always need them on hand to repair damage now, bearing in mind it costs no charges to repair. It really is back to the old worker system in that regard.

So I'm playing a game of Civ 6 with the Gathering Storm expansion for the first time (yes, it's been out for 2.5 years and I've owned it for most of that time, shh) and ugh, there's one major step back. Settler/Worker/Builder micromanagement has always been the worst part of every Civ game ever since I got the original bundled with my Sound Blaster 16 back in the day, and after Civ 6 initially made some big strides to address the tedium, the Gathering Storm brings it back with a vengeance. It's just whack-a-mole like how pollution tiles used to be way back to the dawn of the series. Random bad tile spawns, and you're forced to build, move and order a unit to clean it up. Just now it happens all throughout the game instead of just late post-industrial era games where at least you'd have the infrastructure to address the issues quickly. Screw that, I'm getting the mod that allows you to set the Disaster Intensity setting to -1, because the devs in their infinite wisdom decided that a setting of zero means "few, mild disasters" instead of "off".

Wait wait wait, Encased is a non-party based isometric RPG? I think I'm sold.

Rogue for me, but geez, is it even possible to telegraph the outcomes to the questions harder? I'll stop myself from ranting about how "rogue" these days is just shorthand for "dual-wielding light-armoured fighter". Bring back the Thief class dammit!

Yeah, I do tend to forget that the XCOM I love is mostly the work of modders and not Solomon and co when giving credit. I have a four-digit number of hours in the first game, and it'd still be four digits if I only counted Long War. XCOM 2 didn't even get to three digits.

I like XCOM but loathe superheroes, so so torn about this. Same thing happened to me with Saints Row, so it's all rather topical.

With Bethesda supposedly creating a studio dedicated to remakes, will he have to come in to get his face re-scanned?

Yeah, and to neatly illustrate the divide, I'm the counterexample where I feel it's not enough D:OS and too much PnP DnD.

Just be aware of the BGR sub-pixel layout of the M27Q which leads to some text clarity issues. A quick Google shows the 32" doesn't have the issue, nor does the G27Q (basically the M27Q but 144Hz instead of 165Hz).

I had an Asus UM325 in my cart (importing from Newegg US), a fairly basic everyday laptop with a party trick of having a FHD OLED screen. But I backed out at the last minute because of one really questionable compromise, in that in their infinite wisdom, they squeezed the keyboard vertically: they chopped off 2mm off the keys and without trying it out I'm worried it might be a complete dealbreaker. Goddammit Asus, just make something with a normal form factor please.

I have an admission. I've never finished Jagged Alliance 2, and indeed I've never even assaulted Meduna before. Well, at least I've finally begun addressing the latter point now. Just going through on Novice with as basic settings as possible as is my wont. It took a brief failure of a campaign and about 5-10 hours to even get comfortable with the interface again after maybe a decade-and-a-half since I last touched it. Sort of an honestman mode where I give myself leeway to figure out mechanics where I don't know how they work. Yeah, there's a fair bit to complain about the late-game design, but I'm having a good enough time. I'm playing with just the Strachiatella rewrite for a hopefully less buggy experience but with essentially vanilla gameplay as that's all the complexity I care to deal with. I'm not sure I'd ever want to deal with this inventory management hell again though, so I'm in a bit of a pickle for any hypothetical future run. I heard that 1.13 adds a feature to just sell stuff through the inventory screen instead of faffing about with shopkeepers (never mind the absurdity of how there are like two viable shopkeepers in the entire country), but the rest of it is ehhh, not what I want. (And yes, it's hard to stop myself from repairing that Steel Helmet so it will sell for $12 instead of $10 ...while I have $600k in the bank) _____________ Also went through Full Throttle Remastered in pseudo co-op over Steam Remote Play (I've played the original some twenty years ago but have very little memory of any puzzles). I think this approach has potential and we might try some more adventure games over the coming weeks.

All this talk about the education system just makes me wish Two Point Campus would come out already. And then exploit everybody, of course.

A mum like me. To be fair I played Skyrim before buying all the DLC*. I reckon I sunk maybe 100 hours into it, I'd estimate I got halfway through the main plot, and never resolved the civil war. Just one day I decided I couldn't be bothered launching the game anymore and that was that. 100 hours though means it's my most played Bethesda game by some distance so I'm content with that. And yes I did enable the infinite carry weight console command within the first few hours, after I decided that RPing in this environment was pointless (as compared to say, New Vegas where I'm a stickler for staying within the extremely low carrying capacity of Josh's mod). * Frustratingly I initially passed up on Dawnguard when Amazon had it for $2.50 way back when, and picked up Dragonborn for the same price and Hearthfire for $1.25. I still have no interest in the actual content of Dawnguard but boy was I full of regret when it turned out key roleplaying mods like Frostfall and Live Another Life depended on owning all DLC. Ugh. ______________ Anyway, I've had enough of my latest XCOM Long War campaign. I used it to learn a bit about modding and how to remove mechanics I didn't like, got the campaign to a state where I could trivially embark on the last mission should I want to do it, and I just stopped playing. Yeah that's just what I do - I've done it before and I wouldn't feel any better for ticking off that check box a second time, so I just leave it. And as of tonight, I've also just finished a pseudo co-op playthrough of Fire and Ice, a puzzle game I'd never heard of but which had been added to the NES Classic subscription service on the Switch. By co-op I mean trading off control every few levels with my sister, while the spectator provides suggestions, reminders and general mockery. It's a great little puzzle game, though I admit using save states to reduce the time sink of repeat attempts at each level. I would say as a game it's very comparable to the excellent Adventures of Lolo games and I'd love to see more of this style of game. P.S. Looked it up afterwards and apparently it's a prequel to Solomon's Key, a game I played before but didn't like at all. Firing it up again afterwards and my opinion hasn't changed - time limits on puzzle games are stupid.

Ignoring the screen and inputs altogether, it still might be a decent NUC alternative. Especially since the AMD NUC-likes from Asus and Gigabyte have pretty questionable build quality as it is.

Mario Chase (one of the games included in Nintendo Land) was quite good.