Humanoid

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.

Microsoft don't openly advertise it, so I don't find it all that surprising. But yeah, for those voluntarily sticking with Win7, end-of-support in January is coming, so regardless of how you feel about Win10, it's rather inadvisable to stay much longer. The other reason someone might not be able to upgrade though is that if their existing copy of Windows is *ahem* not entirely legitimate. In that case, one can hardly express surprise that they're happy to not pay for TOW either. 😛

Should have done a deal to do a SimAnt game instead.

Can no one decide whether it's an O or a 0?

There was some bad save corruption going on with New Vegas too I think? A problem like that is pretty much worst-case scenario because it's the least recoverable type of problem - it'd drive plenty of people to simply quit.

The Elder Scrolls series survived Battlespire and Redguard.

What happens on Supernova difficulty is that the companions drop dead the first time you fight anything and stay dead because that's Supernova for you.

TOW as well of course. Took a while to adapt to playing first-person games again, it's probably been a couple years or more since I played a first-person game outside of stuff like Euro Truck Sim. However, once in the groove it was fine - performance was fine, controls were fine (except the talk distance seems a bit short), no weird technical issues. I do have one problem though, and that's that I chose to play a thief - as I usually do on my first run of any RPG - but have found myself far too lazy to loot anything. That of course somewhat defeats the point of being a thief so I'm tempted to restart and go in a different direction. Like New Vegas and the Bethesda games like it, there's just too much mundane stuff around so I end up being less of a master burglar planning a grand heist, and more of a compulsive hoarder: a far less glamourous profession. I'll sleep on it and decide how to go about it tomorrow I guess. One thing to get used to with alien worlds is that it's really hard to get used to telling the difference between the mundane (but shiny) and actual interactable things, and further to that, what's just set dressing and what wants to rip my guts open. EDIT: Oh right, one technical issue in that getting Freesync to work with UWP apps seems to be a fool's errand. Supposedly MS have added a toggle in the latest Windows build to enable it for games where your regular graphics applet can't access, but for TOW at least it currently appears to do nothing.

This is listed as a known issue in the release notes for the current AMD graphics drivers. I imagine it'll be addressed in the next driver hotfix as these drivers were only released today.

Given it's currently just past 5pm PDT and the game has been out for more than an hour, yeah, I think some people are just misreading the various timezones here. The game launched at exactly the time they said it would, which is 4pm PDT, 5pm MDT, 10am AEST etc.

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.