Humanoid

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.

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.