Humanoid

Yeah, I played Smuggler first and had a good time with it. If the entire movie series was like that I might bring myself to not dislike Star Wars. I tried the other classes afterwards, getting to level 10-20ish in each, but nothing really grabbed me and that was it for the game for a long time. Eventually I played a Jedi 1-50 run in co-op with my sister, with me playing the Consular. It was, eh, fine I guess. Probably not ideal to play another Republic class but it wasn't my choice. Oh right, I did get an Inquisitor to 30-odd while only playing story missions during one of those big bonus XP weeks. I don't think I could ever play the game again without an XP bonus because it's just so incredibly better when you can avoid the hundreds of standard MMO filler quests.

I've heard a few times that the expansion content is ...not so coherent for non-force users, so maybe keep that in mind if you intend on playing past level 50.

Yeah, was just going to say ...isn't Disneyland just basically the next town over from the Blizzard offices? For someone like childhood me across the Pacific, sure, the idea of going to Disneyland would have been the picture of decadence, and I never had the chance before I outgrew the notion. But I'd imagine a local could probably visit several times a year on a median income. Indeed a quick Google shows that it's about $100. You could probably buy a couple of WoW pets for that much. Maybe the message is that the pay is so bad that even senior employees can't afford to leave the state for the holidays. EDIT: Holy hell, I was sort of kidding when I said next town over and I imagined in my head maybe a few hours drive at most. But I looked at a map and it's bloody walking distance, you could go there on a long lunch break probably.

I'm installing Elder Scrolls Online (which I accidentally "bought" when I forgot to pause Humble Monthly a couple years ago) onto a 2.5" portable hard disk. This may not go well, but I'm bored enough to try.

Started a few games of Civ4 but after completing one of them I felt I had enough. Went and finally bought Gathering Storm for Civ6, but not sure when I'll get around to it - might look around for a tutorial video first. Played a bit of Euro Truck Sim 2 again, but quickly found out I have no real enthusiasm for trucking around the outdated German countryside again, so I think I'll wait for the Iberia expansion to go live. I don't own the Baltic or Black Sea expansions either but they seem kinda out of the way. I think I also failed to mention previously that I finished both of the Lara Croft and the Something of Something games in co-op. Kinda glitchy but well worth the time. I've never played any of the mainline Tomb Raider games and have no intention too, but I'd like to see more in this series, as unlikely a prospect as it might seem. Aside, I went and cleaned up my email inbox and came across my Dead State backer key which was sent out in 2014 and which I never registered, so I fixed that now. I really should do an audit of old unclaimed keys just sitting in my inbox since unlike the ones in my Humble account or whatever, these can easily get lost. Speaking of which, I might finally have to register an EGS account so I can register my Phoenix Point key, so it doesn't suffer the same fate as that Dead State key. I also cleaned up the dozens of Elite Dangerous newsletters then wondered where the hell my copy was. After a bit of hunting around I remembered that it was just a standalone launcher you get from the publisher and not tied to any of the common online platforms. Whoops.

Yeah, I started with no friends, so it was no surprise I quit the game after the "free" month expired. I hit level 40 in that month, not too hard as a rogue even if I tried to play the early levels as a ranged rogue. Yeah, that didn't work out long term... Later signed up for another month to get to 60 because I was bored, and stuck around only because a couple of people decided to befriend me for whatever reason. Sometimes I wish they hadn't - it would have saved me thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of hours of my life.

Take all the drugs. Never tried it myself since I never tried anything but default difficulty (and am far too lazy to craft anything or use any consumables), but I keep hearing that Alchemy hybrid builds are the way to break the game even on the highest difficulties.

The biggest praise I have for W3 is probably that I didn't give a rat's about exploring the open world (and that's not a reflection on the game, I don't give a damn about it in any game) but still feel I got a game and a half out of it.

Yeah, I'm stuck with 4 SATA ports because using my M.2 slots (in SATA mode) disables two SATA ports (which also functioned as a SATA Express port, as useless as that standard was). And with my Blu-ray drive, that means I only have three ports to play with. So currently I have 500GB in the M.2 slot, and 1x 1TB and 2x 250GB 2.5" drives. I'd have to drop one of the 2.5" drives, or the SATA M.2 drive to add more space without adding an expansion card. Not that they're expensive or anything, and I use one in my NAS box. But I'm also aware of my itch to just build a new PC towards the end of the year, not that my 6700K is underperforming or anything (though my 290X is) but I feel like spoiling myself. So I need to be mindful of my future setup when adding capacity now.

My 120GB G.Skill Falcon from 2010 is still in a secondary machine of mine, one I admittedly don't think I've booted up this year. Cost me $400 AUD. And the next year I bought a pair of Crucial m4 drives, one a 128GB and the other 256GB. Both of those are in service, one in a NUC that serves as my bedroom HTPC, the other in my living room HTPC. Probably around $250 and $500 respectively, bought from Crucial US directly back when the Aussie dollar was stronger than the US dollar. Definitely going to need to buy more storage for the glut of games coming soon, but undecided what to do. Currently there's 2TB of SSD space in my main desktop spread across four drives. Happy enough to just buy another higher-capacity 2.5" drive really since I'm not the type to notice any speed difference, but thinking the smarter thing to do is to buy a PCI-E card with M.2 slots on it so any new SSD I buy can be re-purposed as the system drive of my potential new PC around the end of the year.

Huh, so the Steam Controller was discontinued last year, I must have missed that news. Never held one or even looked up what made it special so that's not surprising. Then again if it wasn't for the need for analogue inputs I'd probably still be using a Sidewinder gamepad from the 90s. Interestingly I can't seem to find confirmation of the Steam Machine/SteamOS project being officially discontinued, which makes for an interesting contrast.

So Microsoft just rolled out a new patch for Age of Empires 2 DE that introduces an annoying stutter every minute or two of gameplay, independent of system performance. However interestingly this only happens on the Steam version of the game, not the Microsoft Store version. Hmm....

I'll feel bad for them the day VIA overtake them on market share.

I'm not picky. Give me an RPG which doesn't involve babysitting party members and I'm happy to accept any camera perspective.

MS Flight Sim will be releasing next month on 10 double-sided DVDs (so 20 DVDs really) for a 90GB installation. So much for my Blu-ray drive. Bloody hell Microsoft.

An external DAC pretty much is a sound card, just connected via USB instead of PCI. There is a belief that this is superior anyway because it isolates the circuitry from any electrical noise inside your PC. From there it's the same thing, connect it to ye olde powered "computer speakers" or better yet, a separate amplifier and proper hi-fi speakers. I'm of the belief that it's pointless to spend the money on a good sound card or DAC unless you're also investing in a pair of good speakers - and they are an investment, being something that can easily last you decades. You don't need to have all the bits separate of course. A very good option is to go for a combination DAC + amp combo for convenience. Sure the amps contained within are generally just cheap T-amps, but in truth, plenty of this type of amplifier is sold by even high-end brands as "digital" amps for 10x the price. I use a budget Topping VX1 personally - probably discontinued now - but plenty such devices exist, some even with a headphone amp included. __________ Important: a DAC and an amp are completely different things and fulfil entirely different functions, and you need both functions to actually make sound. It's just that they can both be in the same box. If you buy a DAC only, then you will need some sort of amplification later. If you buy an amp only, then you are implicitly using the DAC inside the PC (i.e. onboard sound). To generalise how digital sound reproduction works, there are four links in the chain, and all the links are necessary. It goes source -> DAC -> amplification -> output. Any and all of these elements can be separate, or they may all be in the same device. Some examples: 1) One of those ubiquitous CD boomboxes in the 90. It is a source, DAC, amp and output together in one box. 2) A typical 90s PC would have the source (the CD-ROM drive or just audio files) and DAC (sound card) be inside the PC, and the amplification and output be within the powered speakers you plug into the PC. 3) Playing music through your smartphone. The phone is a source, and if you use wired headphones, the phone is also the DAC and the amp, with the headphones being the output. If you're playing through Bluetooth headphones, then actually your phone is only the source, and the headphones act as the DAC, amp and output. 4) A typical home theatre would have a Blu-ray player as the source, connected to an AV Receiver which acts as the DAC and amp, and the hi-fi speakers would purely handle the output. (In the pre-digital days, e.g. for vinyl or tape, the DAC is omitted of course).

GOG finally fixed up the issue with my Witcher 3 redemption thingie so I have a code for the standard edition to give away. It's only good until around noon tomorrow in Poland, so it needs to be snapped up fast. EDIT: Gawn.

I have an 360 (Slim?) and a PS4 Pro, which I've had for pretty much two years now. My gaming usage of either of them has yet to hit three digit hours (indeed the PS4 would struggle to hit half that), so I suppose it's absolutely true that I got no real value out of them. I suppose it's not too late for the PS4 still, but I don't really see myself using it much, if at all, before the next generation hits. - indeed before trying out PES2020 recently there was probably a period of a full year where I didn't use it at all. To be fair to the 360, I didn't buy it as a gaming console, but to stream pay TV, namely Eurosport, as Microsoft did a deal at the time with the dominant pay TV provider here to provide a cut-down pay TV service over the internet for a cheaper price. The only things I ever played on it were FIFA and Rock Band, which are both cross-platform titles, so if not for the pay TV thing, there would have been no reason for me to buy it at all. The Switch has gotten a little more use than the others, but still far from representing good value. I played through the new Fire Emblem and occasionally play Mario Kart, but the latter could easily have been done on the Wii U. But hey, at least it's been used for more than 100 hours, as low a bar as that is. Hell, the best game I played on it was probably Lolo on the NES classic collection. Still, I comfort myself with the fact I never bought into the Ouya, so there's that at least.

I considered buying the Baltic DLC for ETS2 but decided to wait for Iberia (and possibly a new video card or PC) instead. 50% off for a 1.5 year old expansion isn't great anyway, even if it is a historical low. My Steam transaction history since the beginning of 2014 remains like this:

Reminds me of this wholly unironic Blu-ray cover art we got here for Michael Haneke's Amour.

Got seriously screwed over by the Switch version of Flashback, where I got stuck on the last level after some shenanigans involving misuse of a teleporter and a lift with no button to summon it. Now, on just about any other version of the game this would be a relatively minor setback, as the original releases all had a password system to skip directly to the start of any level, and newer, non-Switch re-releases flat-out had a level selection menu. The Switch version though is a little special. Now, for those unfamiliar with Flashback, it does not have a real save system, just a checkpoint one, so there's no earlier save to revert to beyond the last time you activated a checkpoint. As a result, once your checkpoint save is in an unwinnable state, and without the ability to effectively restart levels, getting stuck like this means having to restart the entire game from the first stage. Yup, this is what 30 years of progress looks like - thank goodness I only paid $1.50 for it. To add insult to injury, apparently the re-releases on all other platforms had a toggle to switch Conrad's shirt between pink and white, but this feature is mysteriously missing on the Switch version. Geez, I know it's a less powerful machine, but this is taking the mick. Anyway, I might mess around with emulators and see if I can't just play the final level on the Amiga version (which most claim is the best release of the game) via some emulation. Failing that it should be trivial to play the Mega Drive version which is a close runner-up. Heard some pretty bad things about the SNES one. _________ Beyond that, I've now been playing Age of Empires 2 on-and-off for twenty years, and have finally graduated from being a Black Forest noob. I still don't play competitively because I don't play any games competitively, but it's good to have a little more variety. And in completely different news, I had some issues with my phone which required the reformatting of the external storage to fix. This resulted in the deletion of my FreeCell app and with it my record of thousands of games played, possibly nearing five digits. That's unfortunate. On the plus side, starting over has resulted in a better win rate I suppose, including a 126 match winning streak to begin. Oh, and finally, I bought Ring Fit Adventure. Looks good on first impression, but I'm in the unfortunate situation where I'd have to rearrange a fair bit of furniture and equipment if I want enough space to play it to its full potential - remembering that my bike is front and centre of the living room TV for my Zwifting.

The Curse of Monkey Island, Rayman, The Last Express, Sleeping Dogs.

It's logical to demo something on the worst possible controller no? Like, if it's playable with that then it's playable on anything. Guitar Hero drum controller it is then.

I know of it because it's a front page menu item on Age of Empires 2 DE. I hope they don't replace that button with a Facebook one...

It's a shame because Twitch performs like an utter dog on my Celeron NUC (I know, I know). YouTube works great and the few times I visited Mixer it was somewhere in between.