Humanoid

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.

It's available on Game Pass to try if you're still eligible for the $1 deal.

Part of it is just dumb (bad) luck I suppose in that I played a rogue - because I always play a rogue - but the FF14 rogue is particularly bad for this. At least, so I was told, because I barely touched any other class making it hard to compare. I did try a bit of Samurai towards the end but I was already well on the way to burnout at that stage. It did seem a fair bit simpler though and I'd probably go that way should I return to the game in the future. That said, the most complex rotation I've ever had the misfortune to try was the WoD-era Demonology Warlock. I tried it in a raid once and gave up after a single boss. It was a humiliatingly bad display, and I've played just about every spec of every class over the years. Except mage, for some reason the mage is the one class I've never played seriously. EDIT: Oh right, just remembered that the actual class is Ninja, I think.

Gotta admit I crashed out of FF14 towards the latter stages of Heavensward. Thinking it was probably a mistake to not take a break after finishing the base game, but then that's the nature of subscription games and trying to maximise the value of sunk costs. In the end I lost out on the price of Shadowbringers because I paid for it but never got near its content. The other factor I suppose was that the complexity of basic gameplay was going a bit beyond what I'd like, especially with Australia-Japan latency, just executing my basic rotation became the biggest demotivator by the end of my time with the game. Related to that, the inability to bind commands to the mousewheel really sucks. In some theoretical future, the biggest motivator to revisiting the game might be if they add local servers. It was, after all, what brought me back to WoW after a 2.5 break way back when WoD released. Not that the reunion was particularly long-lasting, mind you. But they've offered a couple of week-long passes to revisit the game in the ~9 months since I left and I haven't bitten yet.

So football is back (in real life) so to get into the spirit of things I thought I might give Football Manager 2020 a try since it's on PC Game Pass. Disappointingly, I found out that Game Pass only includes the full-fat version which I find too complex and does not allow you to play the simpler "Touch" version. Normally you get this version included if you buy the full version, so that's a little disappointing. Now I'm still weighing up buying the latest Humble Bundle which includes it, since it's a fair chunk of change for what are mostly duplicates. Until I decide, I figure maybe I'll just play my old FM17 a bit and that might be enough to scratch that itch. Not like I have a huge amount of time for games at the moment, I'm mostly just playing a game or two of AoE2 DE whenever I do sit down in front of the PC these days. After getting my bearings back, I remember that I left off just after being hired by CSKA Moscow, who are absolutely bleeding cash and aren't qualified for any sort of European competition (which probably lead to the crisis in the first place). I end up playing a full season (finishing second and winning the domestic cup), then a new consortium takes over and sacks me. Actually, that's a lie, they take over and say they had intended to replace me, but after some consideration said they decided they would "allow me to keep my job". I found that statement insultingly condescending so I have to admit I savescummed to back when the takeover happened and ensured that I would be indeed sacked. The off-season was pretty much over at that point so the only available jobs were for small-fry, so fast forward five months to the annual glut of Christmas sackings and I have quite a few offers on the table. So question is, which do I take of these? Newcastle, Watford, Celta Vigo, Malaga, Bologna, Lille, Besiktas and, uh, Go Ahead Eagles. Decisions, decisions. Newcastle obviously the financial powerhouse there but probably the least pleasant place to live.

A bit tired of complex games at the moment so I decided to revisit the 90s and see if I could beat my teenage self. (All the scores are recent - from playing a 10-15 hours within the past few days, but old me topped out at around 21m) Turns out knowing the rules instead of just playing randomly helps...

Got myself a Smart Trainer (an Elite Direto) and trying out Zwift. It's pretty good, but steep at $15/month. Will give it a go for the week-long trial before deciding whether to seek out cheaper/free alternatives.

Finally finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses, some five months after it released. Or more specifically, I finished one of the four routes in it. No, I'm not going to play the other ones, at least not anytime soon. It's a good game. Arguably the best one yet, if you take a snapshot of it at any point in time. But there's just too damn much of it. For those unfamiliar, the game uses a calendar system where the game happens over the course of approximately a year-and-a-half. Story missions happen on a fixed schedule of once a month (leading to the narrative absurdity where enemy forces always wait until the last week of each month to schedule their "sneak" attacks). That's all fine. However, the problem is that there is repeating content that happens on a weekly basis. That means there are about 70 weeks of weekly chores to do over the course of a typical game. I seriously burned out on the game and took a break of approximately two months, while 80% through the game, just because I couldn't be bothered turning it on anymore. The late game tedium was soul-crushing and the only reason I finished it is because I'm doing a parallel runthrough with my sister and we agreed to get it over and done with before the Christmas holidays. Final damage was 165 hours or so. Peanuts for a typical strategy game perhaps, but that's a lot of hours for a game with not terribly much depth.

Nicely co-inciding with the Origin sale that's just started, you can redeem a month's free Origin Access Basic from SteelSeries here. Don't need to own any of their products or anything. In doing so you can get an extra 10% off that stacks with the current sale. Conveniently it's just a one-time 30-day credit, so you're not forced into a recurring subscription that needs to be cancelled. (I used it go buy Sims 4 University, I'm weak I know. 55% discount for an expansion out less than a month ago is pretty decent mind you, even if I'm only buying it for the much-awaited Roommate feature)