Humanoid

It arrived at exactly the time it said it would according to the sticky. Which is also unfortunately the time I start work.

It's utterly inscrutable to me as well, though that also applies to the far more common scenario of people talking about Pokemon.

I signed up for the Game Pass just now and was offered the option to pre-load immediately, for what it's worth.

We're not quite that old - being opened to the public in 2004, that means this place coincidentally is about the same age as WoW, which is about to turn 15 ...and that's pretty much most of my adult life.

Playing a thiefy sort of character is a given because that's my preferred type of character in any RPG since forever. However I think this time I'll ditch the social skills and rely instead on technical skills ...and violence.

How about killing exactly half of the people in the game? Or is there an odd total number of NPCs making this impossible?

They will not.

The lights went out when we lost the subSilver theme on the phpBB Interplay forums.

My CK2 run is petering out to a natural death, just in time to switch to The Outer Worlds. Tried to play a little tall initially with me initially trying to just limit myself to De Jure Italy. But in the end it became crush-or-be-crushed and I had to take bites out of neighbouring realms just to keep up with them, and before I knew it the usual thing had happened and I had all of Italia, Francia and Germania. Truth be told, I don't think the game balance is in a great state at the moment, with too much attention on "sexy" extraneous features like bloodlines and artifacts and not enough on the core game balance. It's been over a year since I played a full game with any serious intent, but somehow Empires seem more stable (and consequently blobby) than ever. India is a perfect red blob ...under the Western Protectorate. Ideally, I don't think something like that should ever be possible without serious abuse of game rules but such is the game right now. Some of this is probably down to the Jade Dragon CBs (this being the first game I've played with that DLC installed), notably Force Vassalisation. On my own part, gaining (or rather forging) Alexander's bloodline has broken the game apart, with essentially free Kingdom-level CBs allowing me to sweep in and easily rip the heart out of the HRE by taking all of Germany instantly, and doing the same to the Muslim realms in Africa. I think that if I ever play the game again it will probably be with Jade Dragon off, because it feels like it was never balanced properly, and with the announcement of CK3, never probably will. Crusades are kinda broken too as there's basically no reason for any Catholic ruler to ever turn them down now, but I can't comment on how it is from the perspective of being a Crusade target. It's certainly not something I'd look forward to. P.S. Elective governments are still pants-on-head levels of stupid too.

Hey, if it doesn't work out, we can always hope for Phoenix Point: Long War.

It'll be a day one mod anyway, along with the nude mod since they're using 3D models now.

Biggest news today is that the decade-old stickies in this forum are have been unpinned. I have a strange empty feeling in my heart.

USB. Chromebooks typically don't have ethernet ports at all, and there is no standard for a mini-ethernet port. Typically you'd just get a USB ethernet adapter, some notebooks might have a proprietary port instead which might connect to a custom dock or whatnot. If you're feeling a bit fancy there are combination dongles that act both as an ethernet adapter and a USB hub at the same time, e.g. this thing.

The Xbox controller is so ubiquitous these days that the alternatives are basically cheaper knock-offs of it, or more expensive, sexed-up glowy RGB knock-offs of it. If you want to deviate from that, you could look into using a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which works out of the box with Steam but a few hoops need jumping to use it more generally. There are also some reported issues with the contacts wearing out relatively fast on some Switch controllers, so you may want to look up the "drift" problem that's sometimes reported. 8bitdo retro controllers are popular and well-regarded but none really have the shape you're after.

The recommended CPU is rather eye-watering compared to everything else listed.

^ That, and the Windows 10 upgrade is still free anyway.

What is this, a Sierra adventure game?

Never heard of it but looks like something I'd definitely play. Will have to wait until after Outer Worlds, however. Not seeing (or more importantly, hearing) all that much Disco in the trailer though.

I had thousands of Freecell games in my record on my WinXP machine, but that just makes me reluctant to start over with a clean record.

Has there been a purple console since the Gamecube? A purple Wii... no, I won't follow through with that.

I wasn't really aware of how combat heavy the game is, which probably isn't surprising as my last two experiences with their games was about 1 hour of trying San Andreas, and maybe 5 hours of tooling around in Vice City. Certainly puts a dampener on things knowing that.

Up against the Xbone XXX.

Isn't that how people greet each other in Texas?

I'm playing Silent Service 2. Dunno why, I never actually learned to play it properly as a kid: I couldn't handle fighting more than one armed enemy ship at a time. In the process of figuring it out now. It's basically a stealth game like Thief or Dishonored after all, except the enemies are faster than you so if you muck up the initial ambush, that's probably it.

I held off on buying it for PS4 because I was concerned about the shooting mechanics on gamepad. That said, I'll wait for a proper comparison between the platforms before trying it one way or the other. Probably would have ended up buying it and not playing it just like all my other PS4 games. Back in April I got an email from Sony asking why I hadn't used my console for six months. Well, I still haven't used it since then...