Humanoid

I want that Bond game to be a spiritual successor to Sid Meier's Covert Action.

I played NOLF2 but not the first one, even though I bought a boxed copy of it later. A pretty banged-up boxed copy on clearance at Kmart, but still. I dunno why I even remember that. Thinking about it, I think it might still be the last single-player FPS I've played, if I exclude hybrids like Deus Ex and Dishonored. Last multiplayer one is probably Borderlands 2. Dunno about the GTA comparisons because the last time I tried the series, I got to the part in San Andreas where you had to ride a bike - I think that was within the first half an hour - and rage quit. I managed a few hours with Vice City prior to that, but alongside with trying the GTA1 demo, that's essentially the sum total of my experience with the series. I can see a Sleeping Dogs comparison I guess, especially the thing about it looking like it's mostly at night.

I essentially come out of this launch none the wiser as to where the value is. The cards launched at $949AUD and $1049AUD here respectively - that's not MSRP, that's price-in-store since it looks like AMD never announced an official price. That does mean the XT gets a bit of a pricing advantage with the gap here ending up effectively smaller than it is in the US. Where things get murky is pricing vs the nVidia cards. Against the nominal $809AUD MSRP of the 3070, the 6800 would look silly. But I don't believe anyone actually sold at that price, and against the market price of the "cheap" 3070s of $899AUD, the AMD card suddenly looks a whole lot better. For the higher cards, I can't really say because I have no idea what the 3080s were actually selling for in real terms. The MSRP is $1139AUD, which is not unreasonable compared to the 6800XT's $1049, but did anyone actually sell any under $1200? I didn't bother checking it out at launch because it's so far out of my range, and finding out retrospectively is far too much bother. Anyway, as tempting as it is to dive into building my new PC - my case arrived yesterday and is taunting me - I will continue to hang out for the 3060 vs 6700 series announcements.

Fortunately that's pretty much the use case of these devices. You just install the software, it walks you through a simple guided process to get your desired result, and you're good until the next time you decide to clean-install Windows. Professionals might want to repeat the process on a regular basis, but for everyone else you just stop thinking about it.

I haven't played since the week of the last patch. There's the basis of a good game in there but I don't feel there's enough to do for CK2 veterans. That, coupled with some long-standing issues around alliances and war in general, and the glacial way in which they're addressing those issues, means the pattern at the moment is to try out a new campaign every patch but end up feeling a bit empty after. At least they've relented and will re-add the attach function to armies now. It was a deliberate omission in the current version as they felt that the AI was smart enough to move and engage intelligently in big melees, but the evidence shows that they vastly overestimated their AI and this is an admission of such.

@LadyCrimsonSince you're spending so much on displays as it is, you may as well invest in some sort of calibration, either something like an i1Display Pro or a Datacolor SpyderX is a great investment for people serious about image quality/accuracy.

Not surprising, the whole "QLED" thing is just a super cynical Samsung spoiling exercise, a fancy name for what fundamentally is still a plain old LCD screen. Hard to believe the name is anything but an attempt to actively confuse buyers - just like the whole "LED" TV thing of the last decade which simply meant "LCD with LED backlight".

Drunk is putting it mildly. You poison him with industrial alcohol, which realistically would kill him. He also stabs his girlfriend and engages in casual cannibalism, so yeah.

After watching Mandalore's breakdown of Mystery of the Droods, it seems probable that having a supreme jerkface adventure game protagonist is an iconic German thing.

It makes sense in that it sort of parallels the role of speakers in any audio system. The work of all the electronics earlier in the chain can only ever be as good as the output device at the end of it allows. Most of the rest of your system simply exists to allow for the monitor to display the best image it possibly can. However there is a caveat in that monitor technology is magnitudes more volatile than speaker technology. Great speakers are things that will serve you for decades, and indeed likely serve your children. Great displays, not so much. Whether or not you think OLED or some alternative technology is the future, current backlit LCD technology and its attendant issues like uniformity is getting really long in the tooth. I would not personally be prepared to spend a whole lot on any LCD product with that in mind, despite having done so in the past.

I'm playing Might and Magic 6 right now. The intro involves your party of adventurers in a fort being attacked by devils. A dragon arrives and to escape it you jump into the nearest well. Miraculously surviving the fall and asphyxiation, you begin to climb back out of the well. However, midway up, you find some sort of Mr Miyagi who lives in a tunnel carved into the side of the well I guess? He shares some exposition and begins the process of training you up into mighty adventurers. *cue training montage* TL;DR: Wise hermit lives in a well you just happen to jump into.

A bit more shopping, halfway between an impulse-purchase and not. See, I was informed of a great deal on a 750W BitFenix Whisper M PSU. Never heard of it before but some research shows it's well-regarded, and the price being asked was two-thirds of equivalent PSUs from the likes of Corsair and Seasonic. But shipping would have made it still-a-good-deal, but I wanted a great deal. The store has a promo where buying $99 worth of Thermaltake stuff made the entire order ship for free. Now I generally despise Thermaltake for how gaudy and plasticky they tend to be, especially in their past, but I was conveniently pointed to what looked like a decent and miraculously understated memory pair, a H-ONE 3600MHz CL18 set. Nothing special spec-wise but for $99 it's very cheap, exactly the amount I needed to spend for the promo, and I've been having problems with my current PC which I had to get around by disabling the XMP profile, so I figure why not. Next, I figured that since I was getting free shipping anyway, I may as well buy the case for my actual build, even if it's likely not happening until next year. So I bought the Fractal Design Define 7 in white, no window, the case I had wanted all along. And finally, I thought that since my current 6700K system isn't all that bad currently, and I need to clean out my current case (a Define R5) to find that damned fan clip, I devised a case shuffle, or musical chairs. I would build my new PC, then move my current system into a cheap-ish case, then in the future use the freed-up case to perhaps build a new system for my sister, whose PC is of a similar vintage to mine (an i5-6500 and RX570 I think). So in the end the damage is: - BitFenix Whisper M 750W _ 2x8GB Thermaltake H-ONE 3600MHz kit - Fractal Design Define 7 White, no window - be quiet! Pure Base 500 White, no window For a total of about $600AUD, happy with that.

Somehow I failed to notice the existence of the Might and Magic 6-7-8 merge project until now, it's been a thing for three years already, and still is receiving updates. Like the World of Xeen thing that merged the fourth and fifth game together, this project merges the three games under the MM8 engine. I've only done a test run so far because I haven't figured out how I want to run my "real" game. There are some natural limitations that come about as a result of the subtly different mechanics between the games. For example, the logical thing would be to want to run the games in release order sequence. But I also want to run a Thief character, and as that class only existed in MM7 and not the other two, it means I'd be forced to take an early detour to another continent when it came time for the class promotion quest. Progression would be smoother if I instead stuck to classes that existed in the first (uhh, sixth) game, but I suppose if I stuck to that game's structure completely, what would be the point of running the merger in the first place? P.S. It also comes with some other modern trimmings like widescreen support, quicksaves, mouselook, etc, though I'm not sure I want mouselook on right now, hmm.

Seems like a well-handled launch from every link in the chain. AMD's official pricing is essentially exactly the same as it is in the US (XE currency conversion plus tax lands pretty much on the dot), and the distributors and retailers stuck to that price, no absurd price-gouging at all. Availability seemed fine in that when I went to bed a couple hours after the launch I could still order one if I wanted to. Hopefully that bodes well for the Big Navi launch, though I do expect much greater variance in mark-ups. Too early for me to commit though, I really don't want to move my aging 290X to yet another machine and with the absence of any reasonably-priced next-gen GPUs from either team this year, a new PC remains a tough sell.

Started tinkering about around the same age, but only by tearing down and rebuilding old systems whenever we got a new family PC. First build I did myself would've been an Athlon XP I guess. It's probably more luck than anything that I've never made any meaningful screwups working with hardware since then.

I screwed up yesterday - or rather, this morning at 2am - when I decided to clean my PC interior for the first time since I built it five years ago. Somehow lost one of the CPU cooler fan mounting clips while remounting the heatsink. The fan stays on acceptably with one clip, but I'm worried the other one might be floating inside the case somewhere and cause a short. Spent two hours looking for it inside and outside the case but it's like it was sucked into a dimensional vortex. You'd think a 12cm piece of springy wire would be more conspicuous but nope. No immediate disaster as the thing still boots up. I probably shouldn't have done so in that state, but in the process of standing the case up back to vertical I accidentally hit the power button - if you couldn't tell by now I have pretty poor build discipline and left it live while working in it. But it does feel like I'm playing with fire, and if it ends in tears I guess I might have to get back on the Zen 3 train. (I wasn't doing this for no reason, I've been having some issues with my keyboard momentarily disconnecting under load and there's a non-zero possibility that it's heat/power/connection related)

I'll be getting one (Sex) just for Overcooked All You Can Eat edition to be honest. That is, whenever general availability of the consoles in-store is.

Given that FarmVille is shutting down at the end of the year, Intel better hustle.

I shelved my Outer Worlds run with the expectation of buying a new video card soon, i.e. within a few months. Well, it's over a year since then and I haven't upgraded a thing, and I will not be doing so until next year. May as well wait for the Gold HD edition now before going back I suppose. ______________ On topic, my last purchase was a microtransaction for Picross Touch on Android. 3600 more puzzles for about $4 isn't too bad I suppose, at a little over 0.1 cents apiece. The main problem though is that the puzzles are evenly divided into board sizes of 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, and 20x20 size boards. The first category is too trivial to be fun, and the last one is virtually unplayable on a phone - at least my phone which is unusually narrow. Being a 21:9 6" display, everything on it actually displays smaller than it did on my previous 5.2" phone which had a conventional 16:9 display. As a consequence, I'm only actually able to play half of the puzzles, but still, $4.

After seeing the prices of all the next-gen stuff that's likely going to be out this year, and accounting for the Australia tax on top of them, I'm shelving my plans for a new PC this year. I was already pretty dubious after seeing the 5600X price, despite it having the same effective official price as the US, but that was contingent on everything else coming together just right. RTX 3070 example: $499 USD plus 10% tax comes out to $780 AUD. The official local price is $809. It's just launched now and the cheapest available model is $899 for one specific model from one retailer with bugger-all availability. The majority are well over four-digits in price. And given that's the cheapest of the announced next-gen cards, this is the point where I officially fold. I'll target a 5600 non-X and either a 3060-series or 6700-series card next year I think. In the meantime, I'm instead going to pivot towards getting myself a couple of new monitors. My ancient U2711 is officially dying - it's been acting up and requiring a power cycle pretty often for a couple years, but now the colour deterioration is becoming increasingly obvious - notably in the blue sub-pixels. I just recalibrated it yesterday and with the colour balance settings, and with blue pegged to 100, both red and green have to be dropped down into the 60-70 range just to get the standard 6500K colour balance. And partly as a consequence of that, at 100% brightness the screen is not bright enough to hit the calibration target. While I'm replacing that monitor, and with Black Friday looming, I figure I may as well double-down and replace my primary monitor, an Asus MG279Q which I never truly liked. Its limited FreeSync functionality was never worth the loss in image and build quality over the two Dell Ultrasharp models that flanked it (a U2715? and the aforementioned U2711), and all of its controls are idiotically placed on the backside of the monitor so I have to give it a reacharound to even turn it on. So yeah, in for a penny, in for a pound: I'm pretty certain I'll be picking up one each of a Dell S2721DGF (a gaming monitor with the usual trimmings) and a S2721DS (their basic IPS screen, only difference to the $20 cheaper S2721D is that the stand is adjustable). Neither are "premium" models like the Ultrasharps, but I think with calibration the difference should be largely negligible. Only complaint is that the DGF looks tacky as hell from the back, with utterly pointless strips of blue LEDs that fortunately can be turned off. Based on recent Prime Day pricing I can pick up both for about $800 combined, still less than the RTX 3070. Yeah...

I want All-in-Wonder mode.

Double post

Interesting and all that, but my playground will probably be in the 6700/XT vs 3060/Ti battle. Said before that I'm okay with stretching to ~50% more than I've ever paid for a video card before, and while that's negotiable to an extent, every single option from both vendors is over +100% of that price. Doesn't help that the local RRP for the 3070 was inflated in relative terms: in the US, a 3070, Xbox SeX, and PS5 are all the same price, yet the 3070 lands at $60 more than the consoles here.

Likely no one is surprised as I am that I'm playing Pillars of Eternity. I don't like RTwP, I don't like party management, I don't like inventory management, and I've only really ever tried to play the game briefly when it first launched. And yet despite all that, here I am playing it. The situation came about mostly because of my irritation at BG3 - not the unpolished state it's in but rather some of the fundamental DnD-oriented design decisions. Reading up on some feedback about the game I happened to be reminded that PoE2 now has a turn-based mode, something that has completely slipped my mind. I didn't know whether such a thing would also be in PoE1 so I fired it up and had a poke around. My save was dated 2017 but I suspect it was just an aborted attempt at resuming the game that might have lasted half-an-hour at best. Anyway, continuing my old save finds me still in Gilded Vale - yes that's as far as I've ever gotten - having apparently just begun the small dungeon in town. I am a rogue, as is my custom, and I remember not particularly enjoying it because the game isn't built for sneak killing enemies one by one like say, a Thief, Deus Ex or Dishonored. Hell, I remember Valygar being a hell of a lot more effective in BG2, though that might be his high level plus 20 years of dead brain cells talking. At any rate, the resulting feeling that it was barely worth using stealth is probably a big reason I ended up dropping out pretty fast the first time around. I don't want to restart though, I'm comfortable with the character in a roleplaying sense - and have just been living with the fact that all I'm doing with stealth for now is to open fights with a sneak crossbow shot. I had hoped that I could be completely hands-off with controlling the companions in combat, but regrettably this has not been the case and they tend to just twiddle their thumbs until I at least order them to get closer. Without micro-managing further than that, the combat is proving to be plenty challenging especially since the early companions seem to be of the squishy variety, one aside. Only after a full day of playing and getting to the point of claiming the player stronghold did I realise that the difficulty was set to Normal, instead of the Easy that I assumed it was on. I guess 2015 me was a bit less of a wuss than 2020 me. I don't think I'd get near to finishing the game in Normal so I think I'll be toggling it down next session. Aaaanyway, the game is playing okay for now. I won't say I'm having a great time but it's passable. I might decide to drop it at any moment to try out the turn-based mode in the sequel but I figure I'll give it at least the weekend to see if I can get into a groove.

The third-party stores also now offer the Steam key version, and it looks like the cheapest among them are Gamebillet and Indiegala at 60% off each, so save a little bit more on top. Both are official stores, no problems there. If you want the GOG version you'll have to settle for 50% off though.