Humanoid

I'd still prefer an Obsidian Midtown Madness.

Dunno what was in my 486, probably something by Cirrus Logic. After that was a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge DX) which had a few 3D features but wasn't truly a 3D accelerator. This was one of the more common 2D cards to pair with a Voodoo, but I never had a 3DFx card of any kind. Richer people would pair one with something from Matrox or Tseng Labs instead, probably. The next card I had was a Diamond Viper V330 (Nvidia Riva 128). This was a bad card, making all sorts of sacrifices in image quality in order to claim the speed throne from the original Voodoo. I remember the wonder videos from Civ2 looking particularly awful with the dithering this card employed, when even whatever the hell was on my 486 had no problem with it. Shamefully, I fell for Jensen's marketing. As many of us know, similar 'cheats' would be employed by nVidia throughout the following years in order to win benchmarks, so there was a bit of a pattern established. Undeterred though, my next card would be a Diamond Viper V770 (yes, a pattern is emerging) with the nVidia TNT2 chip. No complaints against this one, it ushered in the age of 32-bit colour when 3DFx stubbornly stuck to 16-bit, which would be the undoing of the company. After that it's a bit of a blur, as the 00s generally were, with the rapid pace of development meaning very frequent changeovers. I don't know what the timeline is but I had a GeForce 3 Ti500, GeForce 4 Ti4200, Radeon 9800 Pro (it died), GeForce 7900GT (it died), Radeon X1950XT and Geforce 8800GT. I might even be forgetting a card or two, like if I had a GeForce 6 series, it's completely slipped my mind, and I think I had a 5850? But where is it now? Not on my shelf like a couple of its predecessors. I also had a Radeon 8500 "Low Profile" for a couple of days before I realised the shop had pulled a swifty on me by selling it as a 8500LE (which was better than the low profile but slower than the full 8500), and I took it back and got the Ti4200 instead. The following decade I had the following: Radeon HD7950 and R9 290X. Far from bemoaning the lack of progress, I'm just happy to have saved the money from upgrading every 5 years instead of every, what, 1.5 years? EDIT: Oh that's right, I stuck the 5850 with my old HTPC parts then gave the whole thing away to my sister. And my current HTPC has a 1650 Super in it, but that doesn't really count.

I play a thief (a proper one, as in one who steals stuff) type character in just about every RPG with customisable player characters these days, but thankfully that wasn't the case during the IE days (but before Dragon Age). I'm pretty sure I played through BG2 as a sorcerer, and I don't even have the foggiest idea who the notional thief of the party was. I have no memory of relying on any of Imoen, Nalia, Jan or Yoshimo but surely I did, right? Even if only for trap disarm XP, I was a bit of a mix-maxer back then. Come to think of it, the only NPCs I can remember definitely using full-time are Aerie and Valygar. God, I'm getting old.

It's okay, I've played FF7 and FF14 so far so I'm next due to play FF21. As for the PS5, it looks fine I suppose, but is a complete non-starter for me unless they make PS Now both better (i.e. more recent games) and actually available here. And even then it's a hard sell due to the $110AUD controllers, sheesh. On reflection, it's a shame the cheaper models of both consoles aren't swapped. Xbox has most of its titles on subscription so a full-power model with no optical drive would have some appeal. Digital-only on Playstation is just not workable since all the major titles need to be purchased individually and almost every single one of them would be significantly cheaper at retail. EDIT: Let's face it though, I'm probably only going to get either console for Overcooked parties. That is, until the next big rhythm game comeback.

BG2 was more than half a lifetime ago and to be honest, I didn't really roleplay back then, and was more concerned with effectiveness and probably ended up as a pretty milquetoast semi-completionist good guy. These days - well, these days I wouldn't play the game at all because I'd find the large parties and micromanagement insufferable - but pretending I could tolerate that, Minsc (and all the other ones who give you lip) is probably the kind of NPC I'd ignore. Anyway, perhaps as a consequence of not bothering much with the roleplay aspect, I don't really remember anything but the catchphrases. Did the game even let you leave him in the cell at the start?

Second best mod behind coloured education icons. I'm out again after a short-ish India game. The last straw was that the AI exploits a bug where if multiple titles are held, each with their own custom inheritance law, it bypasses Partition for that title, and that way realms are artificially kept together on succession. For example, if you hold the Kingdoms of England (primary) and France and have two sons, normally the firstborn would get England and the second France. But if you assign a custom inheritance law for France even if it's the same law as the rest of the realm anyway, France will also go to the firstborn. So just assign the Male Preference law to all your titles and voila, effective instant Primogeniture. The AI doing this particularly sucks if you're playing an intrigue character and are trying to split up your enemies via murder. Meanwhile in Europe, some random Emir successfully took Rome in the first few decades of the game. The Pope, who easily had more men and more gold than his conqueror, responded by calling a Crusade for Jerusalem. Then one for Syria. Meanwhile, that Emir (who wasn't particularly strong) just quietly continued gobbling up the Pope's lands over the next decade or so essentially unopposed (presumably the Pope's men were preoccupied in the Holy Lands), and around 50-100 years after the game started there is no longer any Pope. Yeah, no one in Catholic Europe cares even slightly about Rome falling, big brain move by the Pope there. My intention was to play in India to let me avoid most of the stupidity that is the game's broken religion system (since all my neighbours are some variant of Hindu, religion becomes irrelevant), but it does get kinda dull because there are no interesting special mechanics that apply to India. It's just the vanilla CK2 experience of fabricating claims and installing the occasional claimant. Time to take a break.

I did think it was a horrible hat. Turns out it's her hair.

Yeah I'm pretty sure I'll pick up a physical copy not long after launch, should be 10-20% cheaper than going directly through GOG and get some minor trinkets (map, postcards, stickers, booklet apparently). If I were to pre-order now it's like $74AUD from Amazon versus $90AUD digital straight from GOG. Even if they do a 10% launch discount that's still an unreasonable premium to pay the devs directly. Would have seriously considered an upgraded version if they had one between the base edition and the ridiculous $429 CE. I do, after all, have the CEs for both their previous games. TOW on the other hand, I have to ask myself if I want to commit myself to having it completely on the Microsoft Store before buying the Season Pass. With Game Pass for PC now at the full price of $10/month, it's less clear cut than it was before. It might depend on whether I end up buying a new XBox this year, because if I do I'm 100% certain I'll go with Game Pass Ultimate and therefore it'd be safe to buy DLC on the platform.

The truce time is halved from what it was in CK2 though, feels pretty good to me. Murdering the guy you just defeated works as well as ever, of course.

Putting CK3 on hold until the first major patch comes along. I tried the More Game Rules mod (which fortunately was easy enough to install on Game Pass, no harder than Steam to be honest) but it doesn't go far enough. Tried Wasteland 3, but stopped pretty early due to a combination of my being out of SSD space, meaning it was installed on an external spindle drive with excruciating load times, and because it didn't seem like low-manning it would have been a good time and I can't be bothered playing a full party. Aside from that, I just tried out the new additions to Nintendo Switch Online thingie, but nothing kept me going for more than five minutes. I bought Disco Elysium fairly recently, might try that next. Might also research how Bannerlord Early Access is coming along.

Biggest quibble I had with AP was that reloading didn't actually restore the same game state that existed when you saved. Can't remember the specifics as it's been so long, but enemies might have just outright disappeared and stuff? As for the Xbox Ses, hopefully there's a way to transfer games not actively being played to an external drive. @LadyCrimson I believe the Xbox Sex is 1TB and both versions of the PS5 are 825GB.

Maybe the new DLC should have been titled Gorgon in Peril. EDIT I prefer the alliterative approach myself. Can't wait for the upcoming Alarm on Amentep and Fear on Fionavar DLCs.

I've probably put in a similar amount of time, but I think I'm either about to put it down until a major balance patch comes along, or get deep into the modding scene (difficult but not impossible with the MS Game Pass version). The fundamentals of the game are good, and it's easily one of the more mature Paradox games in terms of its release state - not that that's saying much. The good thing is that I don't think it's any specific new mechanic that's fundamentally broken, it's just that the numbers (such as fervour loss/gain, religious/heresy conversion rates) seem way off in terms of balancing, to the extent it feels like they launched it with the same numbers they put in on the first pass and never bothered iterating on them for balance. However, the more I play, the more the problems are evident and I just can't ignore them for much longer. War and Religion are obviously the two biggest themes of the game, but sadly they're also the most broken currently. The 867 start date is a complete write-off (to the extent it's hard to believe it was tested at all), and 1066 is merely tolerable with cracks widening into chasms as each game progresses. War simply consists of the AI bum-rushing your capital, even from the other side of the world, and they spam boats to run rings around you because they'll happily do so and pay for it despite being hundreds in debt, all the while your allies twiddle their thumbs. Crusades? Forget any long term impact, they're there for you to get a share of the loot (~1000g on average is no joke) and game the Crusader trait. Within a year the newly-formed Crusader Kingdom will have flipped back to the old religion because the bloody peasants somehow convince the Queen (and it's always a Queen) that spontaneously converting to Islam is a good idea. Cue the next crusade targeting them in a vicious cycle.

Good that they ended up cheaper than rumoured, though even the cheapest of the cards announced today is still ~25% more than I'm prepared to pay for any video card so I'll sit tight for 3060 news. That said, if it might be competitive for the next ten years and no viable option turns up in my price range, perhaps it would be okay - my current card was originally released almost seven years ago after all. It seems absurd to think of PC hardware potentially aging like that these days, but in no way is that a complaint. It's also admittedly heavily influenced by the type of game I tend to play, with ones truly taxing on graphics hardware coming once every few years at best. I mean, the most graphically intensive game I've seriously played is still The Witcher 3, which is over five years old now. So it's not one or the other, but rather a "fortunate" confluence of relatively slow hardware progression and my disinterest in the majority of graphical heavyweight games over the past decade which together has saved me a ton of cash on PC upgrades. If anything, the majority of my PC-related costs over those years have been for storage, which would have seemed an absurd idea in years past. Hell, I barely keep up with hardware-related news these days and just rely on you guys to give me the skinny on what the current mainstream picks are. (For context, the 3070 RRP is $809AUD apparently, I'm looking at more the $600AUD range which is where the 5700XT currently sits, but that'd be a silly thing to buy right now)

Apparently as an Australian I can't install, purchase or even see CK3 in the store, as it's yet to pass the classification board. This could be a pickle, or... Problem solved. Rare thumbs up for the MS Store / XBox app for being so trusting. If only it were that easy on other platforms. (I will, of course, be playing it on Game Pass)

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.