Humanoid

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.

And the patch is just a config file, heh. I assume that's the one that fixed the issue of various key commands being bound by default to the numpad, making the game literally unplayable on any system without one (like most laptops) since you'd need the numpad to access the menu in order to remap the keys off the numpad. It really was a crappy PC port, and it coloured my opinion of the game, and indeed series, for years to come. To this day I've only seriously played 7 and 14.

That's the smallest German age rating label I've ever seen.

Yes it was spoilerman. Loaded up the manual save closest to when I had the fight, which is level 23, so let's say that whole quest gave me a level, so 22. I do tend to float both my attribute and perk points though, so it can be a little misleading. So I have 12 in Tech and Cool, and 9 in Int - also 3 in Body and 5 in Reflexes, both untouched since the game began. I started by grabbing all the non-combat perks in the Stealth tree, then the non-combat ones in Breach Protocol. I'd sort of exhausted both, so then I started putting them into Crafting, despite me crafting exactly zero items so far. So that last bit is kinda my fault I guess? In the end while looking through my stuff, I randomly tried Cripple Movement for the first time and to my surprise, it worked on him and indeed completely stunned him. This let me wail on him with a random purple stick I had in my bags for 40% of his life. Then I repeated the trick. Then just spammed healing potions for the rest (because I have no RAM regen). Awful, awful fight but at least it's over and there were no more bosses afterwards, except presumably one that's being telegraphed hard for the endgame. Thankfully an upgraded Cyberdeck with much more RAM was the actual only piece of gear I've bought throughout the course of the game, because if I had stuck with the starting one, I'd have been completely screwed - the repeated times I tried to shoot him only got him down to barely 90%.

Got to the point of no return, 42 hours in. Not going to finish just yet, but fairly happy with that. Biggest complaint so far is the one forced (I think) boss fight I had to endure, pretty awful when I have exactly zero combat perks, ugh.

I have several games in my backlog, SEVERAL! In all seriousness, I tend to discard games from the backlog pretty quick because it becomes apparent pretty quickly which games I own that I never intend to play. In my younger days it'd be a big list because the threshold of a game being good enough for me to play would be much lower, but as I get older and pickier, there are only a few games released each year that I could ever see myself playing. I also am much quicker to dismiss games because being wasteful with money is nowhere as big a deal to me these days compared to being wasteful with time. For example, I bought Breath of the Wild, played it less than an hour, and am confident I will never play it again whereas someone else might instead place a game played under a similar situation into their backlog. The first 2021 release that I know I'll be playing is It Takes Two, releasing late next month. That's one game that'll immediately be added to the "played" list, and in the meantime, 2021 has seen zero games added to the backlog. Meanwhile, the backlog has now actually shrunk because I've decommissioned my PS4 Pro (I have a Series X now), and with it any chance of playing any nominal backlog games I own on it (which I would say are Persona 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn). So what's on my backlog at the moment? The Outer Worlds, definitely, though the backlog status is questionable even then because I'm waiting for the complete expansions to be released. I'm considering playing Greedfall on Game Pass, and I'm also thinking of going back to Dishonored 2. That's three. Umm, can I retract my statement about having several titles on it? At a push I suppose I could add MS Flight Sim and Wasteland 3, but I'd be fully comfortable if I never ended up playing them either. To be fair there are some special cases like Hitman 2 being "removed" pending a purchase of Hitman 3 and the associated mission import. I've also pretty much removed any RTwP game from the list, which took care of PoE1 and Tyranny, unless by some miracle they get retrofitted with Deadfire's turn-based mechanics.

To mirror the authentic Bloodlines(TM) experience, Obsidian will develop the first two acts, and Bethesda will develop the final two acts.

The Two Point Hospital cycle has become pretty depressing. The base game was a solid release with a few glaring inconveniences that have mostly been addressed through patches and is strongly recommended. The DLC, on the other hand, is extremely cynical in that each and every one of them is essentially identical but reskinned: three maps, some [new disease], and [new disease treatment room]. It's sad, when they started out there was grand talk about creating a new world of "Two Point" management sims. Yet not even a peep of anything but this endless rehashed DLC. I'd say it's about on the level of Sims Stuff Packs, though that might be a bit generous.

Sounds like the type of game I'd love to play co-op. Alas. Then again Parkitect got it as an update, so hopefully it's well received enough to make co-op builders increasingly more of a thing.

I thought that 1/3 at the end there meant that the new release date was the 1st of March. I suck at Twitter. That said, I've been playing the game in earnest, finally. Only just past the big FUBAR and into the open world content proper for the first time. No technical issues really. Playing a pure stealth character more or less and not sure how I feel about it. Part of it is because I'm already stealth-inclined generally, but the other was that I ended up deciding that the gamepad was better for the game generally but at the same time it necessitated making shooting not the major focus of gameplay. Both the stealth mechanics and level design in that context aren't quite as good as games dedicated to the mechanics, but that's understandable given that it's trying to be many things at the same time. Takedowns are clumsier than they need to be, requiring two commands instead of one striking me as particularly silly (grab first then decide on lethal vs non-lethal). I've long thought that Dishonored, even the first one, already solved the most elegant way to takedown and grab but for some reason it hasn't been shamelessly copied, with both Mankind Divided and now this regressing to jankier implementations. That said, I'm letting myself be immersed, walking around at a moderate pace, following the walk lights, etc. I find myself reluctant to drive because of a lack of parking spots means I can't elegantly leave the car anywhere. Even when I'm in a place with parking spots, I find the game doesn't actually let me use them, which is irritating. Seriously, there's like an invisible wall in front of the parking spot itself. Whyyyyyy?

I bought the USB version of a CH F-16 Fighterstick purely to play Privateer so hey. Design as old as the game itself. Sure, without the nostalgia factor there are probably better buys out there. No twist axis back then, definitely, though I dunno how common it is on modern sticks. Meanwhile I've had a Cougar HOTAS for 20 years but have barely used it - too complex for the games I play - obviously it's waiting for Star Citizen.