Humanoid

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.

oh no

Yeah, my ceiling for an Android media streamer is probably around $100, which is what the new Chromecast goes for here. But I opted to try the Fire Stick for $40. Unfortunately its Internet connection tends to drop out, necessitating a restart. Does the job with native Prime content well enough though, it's third-party streaming apps where it struggles. A Shield TV is $200 and the Pro is $300, and when put up against the NUC costing me about $300 total (cheating a bit because I already have the SSD) I thought it was a pretty obvious choice. Was ready to spend a bit more too because I missed out on 40% off a HP Spectre OLED laptop (because the discount was for education and corporate partners) but again, nothing more powerful really ticked all the boxes, so I wait.

I had a Scythe Ninja Rev B on my Core 2 Duo E6300 way back in the day based on a recommendation from SPCR. Ironically it was one of their more disappointing products as unlike the original version, it used Intel's default push-pin mounting and therefore didn't have enough mounting pressure for optimal performance. Speaking of which, too much pressure can cause issues too so you might want to play around a little with that. I also still have their top-down Shuriken cooler in my Haswell-based HTPC which is several years old now. It's extra frustrating because they solved one problem only to create another. They finally advanced the desktop branding to match the mobile branding with the 5000 series, only to make the 5000 mobile series a bastardised mix of Zen 2 and 3. This system is intended to be my bedroom HTPC, for streaming media from both my NAS and from the Internet. The Celeron proved utterly incapable of gaming, even struggling on basic 2D games, but maybe that'll be an option too. And if Asus or another company get their act together, I may just upgrade again anyway come Zen 4 or whatever. And yeah, I've tried alternative options like the inbuilt Smart TV functionality (pretty weak on Panasonics) and an Amazon Fire Stick Lite, but they've disappointed. I've had this setup since 2017, and am happy enough to continue with something similar, even with the waning popularity of HTPCs (with Logitech's discontinuation of the Harmony line being another nail in the coffin). Also considered an Xbox Series S but ultimately I think that's something I'd want to run alongside the HTPC, and not as a replacement.

@BartimaeusI got 15408 on mine back when I built my PC back in early February. Cooler is a Noctua U14S which should be weaker than the Fuma 2. Used the standard NT-H1 included paste. Temps capped out at 89C, which is not a concern for this CPU. This is in a Fractal Design Define 7 case with just the stock fans, but I did leave the door open for the purposes of the test. I was originally planning to set the CPU on Eco mode but on first try I couldn't get the setting to show up and I couldn't be bothered following it up. ____ And now for a significantly less glamourous build. I just picked up a i3 NUC, the older but ubiquitous NUC8i3BEH. I'd be planning to pick up something more powerful, but settled for this now at the basement price of $260AUD. Just couldn't wait any longer: my old Celeron NUC from circa 2015 which chugs on things as simple as YouTube at times. Just putting in a single 8GB stick of 2400MHz RAM and my old 250GB Sandisk SATA SSD in it for now, though there's a question mark regarding the health of the SSD, so we'll see. What I really wanted was one of the Asus or Gigabyte Ryzen-based mini-PCs, but Asus have disappointed with their recent announcement of the new PN51 series, using only Zen 2 mobile processors and leaving out the new Zen 3 ones. That is, they're using the Ryzen 5300U, 5500U and 5700U which are Zen 2, and not the 5400U, 5600U and 5800U which are the interesting ones. (And shame on AMD for the idiotic naming scheme too). Meanwhile Gigabyte could hardly get any of their previous generation ones on the market and have said nothing about a refresh. Incidentally, it's mildly interesting that this NUC8 has a build date of February this year, which means it's still being manufactured alongside the disappointing NUC10 series of the past year or two (which had a tiny improvement in CPU performance and a large drop in graphics performance), and the brand new NUC11s.

I remember starting to watch an AoD LP some years ago just to see what the game was like. Let's just say that if real-life knives were as deadly as they were shown to be in the brief combat segment I saw, Julius Caesar would still be alive.

Yeah, my experience in Trails in the Sky was being sent into a sewer level to kill some rats. I bailed midway through that opening dungeon on seeing it was exactly as described (other than the rat graphics being distinctly unratlike. Anyway, I picked up the much-delayed Iberia expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 (plus the Balkans expansion too because why not). I've only just entered Spain from my home base in northern Italy but I already have one burning question: Spain, what the hell is up with your toll booths? (RL photo, but portrayed accurately)

I'm calling it now, It Takes Two is game of the year.

I'd buy XCOM 1 just for the sake of having it on GOG if it were that price, but alas, only 80% is not good enough. Wait no longer.

Day of the Tentacle, Flying Brick Apple Cider.

I started playing Parkitect in co-op while waiting for It Takes Two to release. Now I have a problem: I want to keep playing Parkitect. It's interesting is that the game has the very definition of tacked-on multiplayer, in that it simply allows a second (or third, or indeed eighth) player to interact with your park at the same time. This mode was added to the game back in December, and it's great - more games should tack on this form of simplistic multiplayer that doesn't change the game mechanics at all. Before going into more depth, I have an admission: I've never played a Theme Park-style game, including the genre's progenitor and namesake. I've extensively played City, Tower, Farm, Hospital and all manner of other such sims, but never the likes of Rollercoaster Tycoon (despite owning a boxed copy somewhere). Nor do I remember going to the corresponding real-life venues, at least since I was a little kid, perhaps some thirty years ago. But I'm kinda hooked now. At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy some of the more fiddly aspects of the game. I didn't think I'd like designing rollercoasters segment-by-painstaking-track-segment, and that I'd be happy using the pre-fab options offered. I didn't think I'd like the detail of meticulously hiding the behind-the-scenes park infrastructure from the guests. I didn't think I could possibly tolerate the idea of building structures using tiny pieces akin to Lego bricks, in a system designed in a world where The Sims' far more intuitive systems never existed. But I do. That's not to say there's nothing to complain about, of course. After all, the measure of how much I like the game is by how much I nitpick at it. The user interface is passable at best, and I would hardly say intuitive, especially when dealing with the Z-axis. A whole slew of objects including critical ones like walls, doors, roofs, bins are simply tossed into a catch-all "Decorations" category in the build menu, making them unnecessarily hard to find. And the game has a really weird economic balance where the default pricing of all your attractions and shops starts far below fair market value. In most management games the default values for things like this - prices, rent, tax rates - tend to be fairly reasonable in terms of maintaining a sustainable income, and pulling the various economic levers tends to be an optional task for advanced players to optimise their productivity. In Parkitect, if you don't immediately adjust prices of every facility upwards by some 50-100%, you're well on the way to bankruptcy. _____________ Anyway, It Takes Two is now out, and it appears to be getting great reviews, so I'm at a loss as to where to go from here with the limited co-op playtime available to me. In single-player land, things are much simpler: I'm just playing some AoE2 skirmishes while waiting for the big Cyberpunk patch to drop. I pondered starting a fresh game of the Outer Worlds as I've just bought the expansion pass, but that seems unwise.

The original never required submission to the ratings board in the first place. They don't rate every single title that's only available digitally on PC.

I made a few posts about it when I tried it last year.

A not-uncommon opinion is that BG3 is a case of Larian ruining a D&D game. But I'm more inclined to say that BG3 is a case of D&D ruining a Larian game. Okay, maybe "ruining" is too strong a word. I don't dislike the game as such. Perhaps it's good that Larian are held back from some of their most lavish immersion-breaking tendencies. But many times it does really feel like the D&D licence is a strait-jacket that stifles the overall design direction - many D&D tropes are after all immutable and sacrosanct and I would not expect and subversion of these to be allowed by the terms of the licence. Furthermore, I did find that the worst parts of my experience tended to come whenever it tried to lean really hard into rolling that ol' d20 for outcomes. Now, there's a good counter-argument that "failure is interesting", and in principle I agree. But practically speaking, having checks structured in the way that they are increases the number of potential outcomes by 50% (and that's assuming a single roll situation, many times the game demands multiple consecutive rolls for success), and the extra writing and scripting required quickly explodes to levels unmanageable by any game developer if they want to keep all the branches interesting and unique. The reality then becomes that the "failure" state simply becomes the mindless fallback of hostilities breaking out. It's like games where failing a pickpocket attempt similarly turns an entire town hostile, it's not a useful or interesting turn of events and just leads to save-scumming.

Aren't those synonyms?

I think the Greeks used the cubit in those days. One cubit is the length of a forearm. So a 3.5 cubit floppy disk would have a diameter of a little over 1.6m. That converts, surprisingly, to 5.25 feet. Can't be a coincidence, surely.