Humanoid

And now I see the next expansion is a Star Wars crossover. Not that I really see myself buying any further DLC for the game, given that the well is, well, well and truly dry by now. I mean, the last DLC before this Star Wars one was based around knitting. Just knitting. Yeah...

I completed a university degree in The Sims 4 for the first time. And also probably the last time. Getting a degree involves completing twelve units, at the rate of 1-4 (your choice) per "semester". Each semester is one week, resulting in an overall duration of 3-12 weeks. After going for a maximal four units first up and getting overwhelmed, I scaled back to three, and even then it was a scramble. The issue as I see it is that for anything but the lightest workloads essentially for each of those weeks you're either: a) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they attend a lecture b) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they do their homework c) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they they write their term paper Actually that last one is a lie. I had to wait for them to complete it just like all the other tasks, except the progress bar was invisible. I also tried joining a sports club, this led to: d) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they attend soccer training So yes, attending university involves simply initiating each of the above activities then putting the game on fast forward for a few hours. Between all those activities (I quit the sports team after a few days), there's really no time to do anything else but attend to your most simple biological needs. At the end, the reward is that you get to start your normal career several ranks up instead of at the very bottom of the ladder. Consider the fact, however, that if you had simply joined at the bottom of the career ladder instead of busying yourself with university, you'd probably have been promoted up to at least that point anyway, and earned money while doing so, instead of ending up in debt. Well, at least the student loans are easily paid off within a couple weeks of graduating, which I gather is not realistic in real life. I suppose this is standard fare for the level of interactivity the entire mediocre history of The Sims 4 has already established, but disappointing all the same. Even the task of simply eating each day involved waiting for one of your roommates to magically conjure a roast chicken or lobster out of thin air because that's the only way to get decent food into the dorms.

Yeah, I'm going to force myself to use three pre-made characters this time around because as mentioned, last time around by the time I got a party together the mood to play the game had gone. I find these days a game has to grab me quick, like within an hour, or I'll probably end up indefinitely shelving it. To this day I've spent more time on character creation in W2 than I did on the rest of the gameplay combined.

Give them a taste of their own medicine and switch to hard tackling, get stuck in, etc, once they make all their subs.

I'll try not to burn myself out during character creation this time.

It's the board's fault for sanctioning the transfer anyway. It's always the board's fault. Dunno how it is with newer versions but for smaller clubs I always felt that if you played to the budget, the club would go broke, and if you didn't play to the budget, you wouldn't have enough players to even fill the bench. It's almost if they're designed to be stepping stones, to be managed to the brink of bankruptcy before you move on to the next club, to do the same with. Then again, they have the gall to complain about my financial management when they've hired me mid-season and there hasn't even been a transfer window yet, so I don't feel the least bit bad about it. SI probably just leave it like that because in the game the clubs always survive anyway so there are no long term consequences like clubs being poofed out of existence in real life. It's a little bit disappointing that I'm not actually an existential threat to the club.

I've never played any of the Hitman games, though I inevitably own several of them. However I can still relate to the complaints as it's a good series to occasionally watch people bumble through though, and it does often seem that 47 treats the player input as sort of a mild suggestion rather than a direct order. Now, I wonder if any game has attempted to map walking to the D-pad and running to the analogue stick. It's stupid enough that even modern games can think it a good idea to have menus only navigable with the D-pad. I'm looking at you, Persona, you suck.

Probably talking about the ones before the reboot, which had dumb things like the context sensitive attack button making 47 get into shoving matches with enemies instead of properly attacking them.

At first my brain couldn't process how that fan would even move useful airflow. Then I saw the triple slot bracket. That rumoured price point is over four times the highest price I've ever paid for a video card. I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to exceed that figure with the next one I buy, but I figure maybe by about 50%, not 400%.

I can wait 'til it appears on Humble Monthly, like all the other Hitmen Hitmans I own.

Based on CK3 releasing on Game Pass, I was relying on the fact that I wouldn't need to pay for it anyway,

A complete rewrite of the game perhaps? https://www.bloodlines2.com/en/an-update-on-the-organizational-changes-for-bloodlines-2 EDIT: Statement from Mitsoda provided to RPS here.

Remember how I complained two posts ago that the days in CSD2 really dragged on? Turns out that it's because the game engine, like many poorly-written DOS games of yesteryear, can only measure time by the amount of frames that have been displayed. Well, I have been exclusively playing this game on my Celeron NUC... The short of it is that the game is probably running at half of the maximum capped frame rate of 60fps - probably even less most of the time - and as a result each level ends up at least twice as long.

I finally made an EGS account yesterday so I guess their persistence finally worked. No reason to install the client just yet to so I have no idea how good it is. As long as it's more reliable at actually downloading games than the Microsoft Store app, I'll be happy, as that's all I ask of a distribution platform. I will treat it like any other non-GOG platform though, in that I'll buy from it if it has the best price. Based on my recent shopping that seems unlikely, since I almost always end up buying from the likes of Fanatical, WinGameStore, Voidu, etc. (I'm willing to pay around a 10% premium for GOG though) P.S. I didn't know it didn't have achievements, but that's a plus in my book. Hate 'em.

It's a Cook, Serve, Delicious cook-off as I compare CSD2 to CSD3. Whose cuisine will reign supreme? In one corner we have the 2017 title, which I am playing in single-player mode, courtesy of Oner. In the other corner, the technically-not-released-yet CSD3, which per an announcement just today is due to come out of Early Access in October. That one I will be playing in co-op via Steam Remote Play, as it is owned by my sister. In terms of the core gameplay loop, CSD2 has you completing a full workday, from 7am to 10pm, in a restaurant in an office tower. Each day is mostly fairly sedate, but is broken up by two rush hour periods of heavy activity. CSD3 has you operate a Food Truck, where every day has you make a few scheduled stops, and between stops you have to deal with pre-orders while also ensuring you have enough food pre-prepared for the rush of customers at the next stop. Overall, CSD3's system is significantly more fast-paced, but is counter-acted by having each day be considerably shorter overall. We're talking on the order of 20 minutes vs 10 minutes per level here. This is amplified by the removal of the "side dish" mechanic, which was essentially a mechanism to "stall" customers by making them significantly more patient if you have such dishes prepared. It feels a little gamey, in that somehow customers are somehow willing to wait twice as long for their burger if you also happen to have fries ready to serve, and three times as long if you also have salad ready, even though they will only ever buy one side (and will always buy a side if it's available). CSD3 inverts the challenge by instead providing you a couple of new tools to deal with the otherwise overwhelming rushes: the aforementioned pre-order system letting you know which foods to focus on while in transit, and a robot assistant which can automatically serve any and all ready meals instantly, at the touch of a button. In short, you deal with rushes by being able to serve food items faster instead of you trying to buy more time. Outside the actual levels themselves, CSD also feels a lot less grindy. In both games, completing each level gives you resources to buy more recipes and to upgrade your facilities, but CSD3's feels a fair bit more generous, and you are essentially never short of having enough cash to buy a complete new menu for the next level. In CSD2, completing a level might provide you with enough to buy one new dish on average. To be fair, a large part of the game involves being a chef-for-hire in other restaurants, where you earn a wage (and tips) while having no control over the menu, so the recipes you've learned for yourself are only relevant when working in your own restaurant. Aside, true to American dining culture, just as much of your daily earnings, if not the majority of it, will come from tips. This makes it particularly aggravating when some foods, and indeed some entire levels, make you ineligible for tips. When this happens, you end up spending just as much time and effort on a level as on any other, but arbitrarily find your income halved, increasing the grindiness of the game even more. CSD3 dispenses with the tipping system altogether, fortunately. It's one of the perks of the complete collapse of society that is the game's backstory: the whole thing is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic Mad Max version of America. Now to be fair, I've only played a few hours of each title at the moment, but at the moment I think the third game is the superior one, mainly for being more manageable in terms of time commitment. I feel a lot more comfortable finding a 10 minutes in my day or just before going to bed to play a short gaming session. And for the completionist players, of which I am not one, failing a perfect run near the end of a short CSD3 run feels a hell of a lot less infuriating than doing so at the end of a 20 minute slog. TL;DR: Feel free to just skip straight to the third instalment.

The uncanny valley models are the horror element.

Now I'm picturing a bunch of vampires in Hawaiian shirts.

Played through Wildfire in co-op. Bit of an odd game as at times the co-op functionality seems to be fairly perfunctory - player two is just a palette swap and their existence never acknowledged by the plot - but at the same time lends itself to some interesting organic solution to some puzzles. An interesting enough game, though graphically rather bland, and the enemy faction for some reason consists purely of identical female Roman centurions. Anyway, no doubt there's more to it than our quick "just finish the game" run would have experienced, but it's not a something I see myself replaying - I have no interest in the completionist type runs, or in the achievement-oriented objectives like ghosting levels that's probably the hook for more hardcore players. For the unfamiliar, it's a 2D sneaker sort of game, where the gimmick is elemental magic, for mostly non-offensive purposes. Interestingly, killing is pretty hard to do in this game, with no stealth takedown mechanic or even any way to harm enemies directly - you have to rely on environmental damage to do so. Doing things like throwing a ball of fire at someone just knocks them back slightly, and other variants of your basic spells do fairly basic things like disorienting them for a few seconds, or causing them to run away in panic. This leads to an interesting reversal where unlike most games of the genre, we actually murdered as many guards as possible because the novelty in doing so when the situation allowed made it fun. The accessibility of "solutions" like that, plus the likelihood that the game wasn't truly balanced around the existence of a second player, meant the difficulty curve was a bit all over the place, though on average it felt about right.

I can't make heads or tails of what you guys are talking about, and couldn't see anything on the GOG front page either. Only figured it out after diving into their forums and now I'm offended that their official post has broken BBtext and they never bothered to fix it. Disgraceful.

I'm messing around with PS4 Remote Play, streaming to my desktop, partly because I wanted to finally try HZD but from the comfort and warmth of my home office, and not my cold, cluttered living room. Sitting on a sofa playing games hasn't ever been my thing unless it's a game mode that necessitates it, like split screen multiplayer. Haven't actually fired up HZD, despite buying it when the budget re-release came out, but have tried a couple other things. - Pro Evolution Soccer 2020. Response time was fine, I'm not a good enough player to notice a difference in timing precision, but the graphics get a bit distractingly blocky, likely because of all the very similar shades of green. I don't think this is a game I'd continue to play this way. - Persona 5. This marks the first time I've used the PS4 for anything other than football games since I bought it in 2018. The basic setup of the game didn't capture my attention back then and I abandoned it after the tutorial. Tried going on a little further and on the plus side, the player character isn't quite as much the insufferable kid who thinks he's the coolest guy on the planet as the tutorial made him out to be. Anyway, it isn't exactly graphically sharp but I didn't mind the overall quality as much as I did with PES, presumably because of the solid block colouring of its artstyle. But yeah, next up I suppose are the two other heavily-recommended PS4 games I bought and haven't touched yet in HZD and Nier, though I'm a little concerned that they'll have similar issues to PES, since they're more about photorealism. And I also own Monster Hunter World for no good reason. Let's see if I can find one good single-player PS4 game worth playing before the next gen consoles release. And yes, with the addition of FIFA 18, the titles listed in this post are the sum total of games I've bought for the thing in over two years of ownership.

Blizzard caught on to my stealth rezzing shenanigans back in 2006, so they took their sweet time on that. Still, good times, good times.

Incidentally, this thing is releasing in four days' time.

It's F2P for the base game and the first two expansions, so levels 1-60. But there's such a huge gulf in quality between the base game and the expansions that it may as well not matter: you go from eight fairly well-defined stories, to all classes being funneled into the same story, one for each faction (so two overall). You want the 1-50 experience for each class, then if you still want more of the game (I didn't), just continue onto the expansions with one of them. The details of the F2P restrictions have changed a bit since I last played, but the basic idea is that you have three tiers of players: subscribers, "preferred" players, and pure F2P players. Preferred status is given to anyone who has spent money on the game at any point, whether that be in the form of a lapsed subscription, or microtransactions. I remember the pure F2P mode being incredibly restrictive, with something as basic as having enough hotbars available for all your skills being locked out, a hard limit on the number of active characters you could have, and the various forms of Quick Travel had much longer cooldowns. Back then I would definitely have said that being Preferred was essential just to make the game playable for me. They've since added, uh, one extra hotbar, but I don't know if that'd be enough. EDIT: Subscribing for a month would be the best way to get Preferred status, because it gives you access to all expansions currently released, and access is kept after the subscription lapses.

I did subscribe for once upon a time, to get the preferred status perks. But that was back when Origin Mexico were selling subscription packs for heavily discounted prices, which is a loophole that's since been closed. Looking at the event history, there was an 8-week double XP period that only ended a month or so ago, so it's probably not hard to catch one for people not in a rush. It's not like this content has changed in, wow, it's been nearly nine years now.

Will try out the base game on Game Pass as a demo of sorts probably. Then buy the time a few DLCs are out and the game matures, the price of the base game should be comparatively negligible when deciding to buy on another platform. To be honest, I wouldn't have much problem buying it on the MS Store either if not for a recent problem where downloads just don't work unless I turn on a VPN. I don't care about all the other features of the more, uh, fully-featured platforms at all, but being able to download your games without jumping hoops is kind of a basic requirement. And to be clear, the issue isn't even about hiding my location or anything weird like that. I can set the VPN exit node to be in the same city as I'm in and it'll download no problem.