Humanoid

Bioware started it with a bull, Larian responded with a bear, so the next logical escalation would be something like a hippo or elephant.

Yeah, one commonly overlooked thing is how good the Occultist is at the front. People tend to have the impression he's a standard RPG wizard and hide him at the back, but he's got the most reliable single-target stun in the game (Hands from the Abyss) and his melee attack has both a high crit chance and bonus damage against Eldritch (the most common enemy type in the game). Accuracy isn't great, but the general rule for every class is one accuracy trinket, except Leper where you take two accuracy trinkets. Don't forget Houndmaster who has the best Mark skill, with a big Prot debuff on the target. And of course he's the only one of the four Mark classes with a stress heal. That said, Mark isn't a universal solution to boss fights because of how the duration ticks down. When bosses have two or even three moves a turn, that means the Mark wears off two or three times faster.

Not quite there yet, but you're well on the way to discovering the fun of "dance parties". Maybe not with three Grave Robbers as such, but equip one with her best move, Lunge. Then add two or three more party members who also move themselves forward (and optionally backwards) with their best attacks. Grave Robber Lunges then Shadow Fades. Highwayman Duelist Advances then Point Blank Shoots. Shieldbreaker ...well, basically all her skills move her either forward or back. And while less explicitly dancers, the Jester (Dirk Stab/Finale) Crusader (Holy Lance), Man at Arms (Rampart), Hellion (Breakthrough) can also participate in this style of play. It's both very fun, and makes it so that you're far less vulnerable to being surprised by enemies. But yeah, the boring meta team is "Jestal", Jester and Vestal. Coldly effective but it's just so boring to play. You can easily complete the game with static parties where every member just operates independently, but dance parties and a third type of party, built around using Mark (using 3-4 of Bounty Hunter, Occultist, Hound Master and Arbalest), are great to keep yourself from burning out with the same old strategies.

I barely even got to start the Hinterlands, I remember getting to my castle, starting one of those missions where you have to wait in real time for it to complete, then decided to quit for the day while it completed. I never ended up launching the game ever again.

I never felt that dungeons ever actually went up in difficulty, and indeed you probably outscale the dungeons if you know which trinkets to farm, because that's the only place where you actually have decisions to make in terms of the power level of your units. The rest is, as you say, just farming gold in order to unlock and buy better skills and gear levels, no decisions required there. Rushing the bank district is a pretty decent idea, and remember to sell duplicate and junk trinkets regularly. They don't. All of the game rules are actually stored in plain text for easy inspection and modding, and as such is one of the easiest games to mod that I've ever encountered. The file scripts/map_generator.darkest confirms this by only having one entry for each combination of dungeon location, length and mission type. For example: Scouting is an incredibly powerful mechanic that's easy to neglect. The game doesn't make it terribly easy to understand how it works, so here's a guide:

For gaming it's really just either a 7600 non-X or a 7800X3D really. Occasionally the 7600X will be discounted to within say, $10-20 of the non-X, but there's only a few percent between them. Both are very efficient, cool-running chips so motherboard selection isn't all that crucial. Impossible to make any firm recommendations without seeing prices, but over here the best value mainstream picks will be boards like the MSI B650M Gaming Plus and the Gigabyte B650M DS3H. Upper-midrange picks will be the MSI B650 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite and Asus TUF B650-PLUS. Depending on whether your current Intel board is a DDR4 or DDR5 version, you may also need new RAM. The general pick for AMD will be a 6000MT/s CL30 kit.

I like OLED have run an OLED laptop for a few years now, and especially post laser eye surgery, really appreciate the elimination of glare. But while I would happily drop the cash on the now-acceptable pricing on a solid OLED gaming monitor, the problem is that I have three monitors and I don't think just replacing one of them on its lonesome is going to help me much. Getting three of them for ~$3.5k is not on the table just yet, but with current Aussie pricing I think the AW2725DF is clearly the product that makes the most sense for me.

Finally pinged ol' mate Satya on Teams and asked to get on the sweet, sweet Azure presumably.

Darkest Dungeon finally has a new healing class to rival the Vestal.

They're generic 3D models (not just characters, any 3D modelled object really) that are purchased individually and imported into any engine. Useful for indie devs so they don't need to employ their own artists, though I suspect the reason it's most obvious in adult games is that they all buy the same base models and just drop them in with zero to minimal customisation. EDIT: Sorted by popular and the fifth result is a pre-fab Jesus for the low, low price of $243.99. If you were trying to spin a quick buck making a Christian edutainment game, it seems a pretty obvious route to take. Though apparently it's another $50 to put him into a videogame, or $1.99 extra if you wanted to 3D-print him. Hmm...

I have no idea who Neil Breen is but I will infer that it's the name of a female Japanese wrestler.

Yeah, AMD in a BIOS update around a year ago clamped down hard on how much voltage the motherboard vendors could feed the CPU to stop exploding CPU issue, and more generally the motherboard arms race, in its tracks. Not exactly the same as a power limit, but the same idea in essence. Intel are for now happy to stay in the grey area where they can use the arms race to make themselves look a couple percent better in benchmarks while maintaining plausible deniability. I am in no way absolving the motherboard vendors for acting like complete cowboys, but it is with tacit endorsement from Intel.

Star Wars is a 70s movie, so if it doesn't have 70s hair styles, is it really Star Wars? That said, the few Star Wars games I enjoy, I do so despite them being Star Wars games, not because of it. I have not, and will not ever watch a full Star Wars movie, though I suspect I've seen enough fragments of the original trilogy such that if I were able to assemble them together they would constitute a full movie.

Encased has the most ridiculous stealth system I've ever seen.

It sounds like an April Fools joke one week early, but they've just released an official statement: "We are looking at adding a feature to the Steam version of the game that will allow players that are already playing to restart the game. "

To be fair, it seems this is mostly an artifact of Steam Cloud integration messing with the one-save-per-account system (which obviously is in-itself questionable). You're supposed to be easily delete your save and start fresh, from what I understand. The microtransaction being sold is meant to be for editing your existing character. You buy an item, whether for $2 real money or whatever in-game currency it costs to buy it from a regular vendor, and it allows you to modify your character once per purchase. I feel the more egregious thing though is that the game's auteur was yapping on about how fast travel is bad for games, then immediately undermines the semi-valid point he was trying to make by selling consumable tokens that allow fast travel from anywhere. This is exactly the behaviour that one would expect from Capcom, actually. The latest Street Fighter is a huge offender, as are recent Monster Hunter games. Apparently the first Dragon's Dogma also had some cynical nickel-and-diming, but they were mostly removed by the Dark Arisen re-release/expansion which was sort of a "Definitive Edition" of that game. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to wait for Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen...

It's wild to think that you need to abuse a workaround to do so without paying $2.

Yeah, it'll probably be a good gig for an up-and-coming studio to try to make a name for themselves, even if they have to put up with working with the awfulness of Hasbro/WoTC for a while. I imagine multiple such projects will be commissioned now.

While I wouldn't have minded some new additional content for BG3 before saying goodbye, ultimately I think it's the right decision for Larian to do their own thing instead of hitching their wagon to the D&D licence. I'm steadfast in my opinion that BG3 is good in spite of being a D&D game, not because of it. No matter what you think of the state of BioWare today, few would argue that they made the wrong decision by abandoning the KoTOR series after one game and going their own way with homegrown IP.

There's hope yet for Limbo of the Lost!

I've never really considered their total body of work too closely, so just my snap opinions on each listed: KoTOR2 - My video card (a 7900GT? Something like that) died before I finished the tutorial. Never went back to it, bearing in mind this was a few years after the original release as is, probably circa 2007? So I was already sort of forcing myself to play it in the first place, never really had a strong incentive to because I don't like Star Wars. (I don't hate it, I just tolerate it in a gaming context if it's a good game regardless of IP) NWN2 - I have no memories whether positive or negative about the original campaign. I assume my save just petered out somewhere around mid-game but who knows. I couldn't get through the MoTB tutorial because of D&D sneak attack rules meant my rogue was not viable. I did play SoZ up until the final dungeon and liked it well enough. Alpha Protocol - Never finished it but admired the structure and ambition. The mechanical jankiness wasn't actually that big of a deal for me because I don't generally play this type of game for the challenge. I didn't particularly liked the timed dialogue and the lack of customisation. New Vegas - One of the best games of all time. Dungeon Siege - Dunno, I don't play ARPGs. South Park - Very good until the zombie apocalypse ruined everything that came after, which felt like filler. Damn shame. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity series - I'd outgrown RTwP by this point and couldn't get into any of them. Yes I know Deadfire got a turn-based mode later, but a bit too late and without the game being designed whole-cloth with it in mind, the patch could not address the issue of far too much combat. The Outer Worlds - I abandoned it early due to the poor handling of stealth, turning it into far too much of a shooter for my tastes. The only reason I tolerate games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and Cyberpunk is because I can bypass their clunky combat mechanics, which is not possible in TOW. Grounded - Dunno, don't play survival games. Maybe if I had a regular group to play co-op with, but no chance solo. Pentiment - Should be up my alley, just need to overcome inertia to get around to it. It's only been out for ...wait it's been more than a year??? Where did the time go? (To be honest, I spent less time on video games in 2023 since, oh, probably since the late 80s)

I never gave much thought to the pronunciation of Dune with or without a hidden 'y', but hearing it a few times lately and all I can see in my mind's eye is "Doon". I'm no linguist but it kinda feels American. Is it?

Fair, it's just that I've never heard it talked about like that before. Perhaps not so surprising given almost my entire knowledge of baseball comes from The Naked Gun. Whenever the annual 10 hour trial of FIFA on EA Play rolls around, I start a career mode as a lower league player and figure I'll make a proper go of it. But then I get around a third of a season in (somewhere between a dozen games and two) and I feel I'm done with the game until the next instalment.

I always assumed that MLB The Show was sort of like a talk-show or game-show spinoff based on baseball, as opposed to being a game where you actually play baseball. Huh. (Think BBC Match of the Day for Premier League football for example)

He does like them a bit older.