Humanoid

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)

Well I certainly hope he's more Solskjaer than Lampard. 😛 Either way though, I guess this is the new trend in manager appointments. Everton will probably buck the trend by hiring Moyes though, since they've already gone past the Big Sam phase. Classic.

Surely no one can command a tutorial worse than Bradford does with his 25% survival rate.

It's the same logic to why Weird Al doesn't generally take suggestions from the original artists for the purposes of his parodies. The only exception I know of was for Like a Surgeon, which happened via a mutual friend.

I'd take Giroud as a replacement for Llorente. No space in our medical facilities for Wheelchair obviously. Not sure what's happened with Emery given that he tactically shredded us at your place last year. But it appears a tight race between him and Marco Silva for the sack. Unless of course Watford decide to switch managers every couple of months. Time to re-appoint Gracia?

Every time I see the "hard wood and round holes" thread in the topic listing I always think it's about golf.

I question how developing a Star Wars game can be considered in any way unsafe.

I wonder how long it'll take me to stop doing a double take when I see headlines containing "Spurs boss Jose Mourinho". It's something straight out of Football Manager. I did feel it was time though. As a wise man once said, "sometimes people outgrow one another, it's very sad but you can't let it drag you down." First away win in eleven months, strewth.

I was out sick for about a week recently followed by a week of minimising time spent sitting down - nothing too serious but kept me gaming in bed pretty much the whole time. My gaming time was therefore understandably limited and I have not played Outer Worlds since the launch week, though I think this is the week I finally pick it up again. One consequence is that I regrettably picked up the Freecell bug again after over a decade off, and that played havoc with my sleep schedule: "one more game" rapidly turns into forty. Over the course of a week and a half, I have played probably 600-700 games. Estimating about 5 minutes per game, that's 50-60 hours in say, 10 days, for 5 hours a day. That's kind of beyond the pale, so I have resolved to only playing it on my phone when I need to burn some time, and quit cold turkey on my PC. That said, I'm happy to report that playing it was like riding a bicycle and that it took almost no time to get back into shape. Across all devices I'd say I ended with a 92-93% win rate with a best winning streak of 49. The other surprise hit was Adventures of Lolo on the Switch NES classic thing. I moved my Switch to my bedroom and explored the various NES and SNES games I'd never played first time around, which was most of them. Regrettably, most of them were awful and not worth spending more than 5-10 minutes on. Lolo, especially once I started playing it as a pseudo co-op game with the online feature, was the uncontested star of the bunch. Hopefully the sequels turn up on the platform eventually. Anyway, now that I'm mostly healthy again, I'm sort of left with a strategy itch. However my options all have a big caveat attached to each of them so I'm reluctant to start any of them. I think I'm done with CK2 for the time being, especially if no more balance changes are going to ever be made again. Civ6 I'm still lacking the Gathering Storm expansion which I hear is a Big Deal, but I'm reluctant to buy it before hearing definitive news on whether or not another expansion is forthcoming. And XCOM Long War Rebalance is in a really weird state where the lead dev has decided to completely overhaul the Overwatch mechanic seemingly on a whim. I think it's some sort of weird compulsion to fix everything that isn't broken. Maybe I'll just end up playing the new Stardew Valley patch releasing this week when I need something other than TOW. P.S. I got up to chapter 20-21ish in Three Houses before completely losing momentum. I have no interest in picking up the game to complete it for the moment, despite being just 2-3 chapters away from completion.