Humanoid

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.

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.