Humanoid

Finished the "Pebberley Island" DLC for Two Point Hospital. The first level was fine, nothing out of the ordinary. The second one was very interesting, being the first outdoor hospital. The third level was a godawful abomination. Like, a completely standard hospital except the patients come in waves. As an overall product, Two Point Hospital I liked well enough. But I don't think I can justify buying the DLC anymore, at least not without deep discounts or in an eventual bundle. I'd rather them just move on and make Two Point Park or Two Point Tower or Two Point Zoo, etc.

Disclaimer: have yet to buy a new fancy OLED TV or anything like that, but from what I've seen in the stores it's still, in my eyeballs anyway, an issue. Maybe not as bad, but still there. OLED is an emissive technology, which is to say, each pixel produces its own light. When the pixel is black - i.e. off - it produces no light whatsoever, hence true black. If you have an OLED TV turned on but showing nothing, in a completely dark room, you won't see a thing. LCDs, no matter if they're TN, VA or IPS and whether they're marketed with fancy terms like LED or QLED, operate using a backlight, and while on expensive models the backlight can be turned down, it's never truly off and therefore you will always see a grey rectangle in the dark room test. QLED probably exists mostly because Samsung has too much pride to licence OLED technology from local rivals LG, whereas the Japanese companies in Sony and Panasonic have relented and now purchase their panels from LG. All that said, a side effect of OLED not having a backlight is that its peak brightness is somewhat lower than older technologies, but this shouldn't be an issue unless you're regularly watching TV in a room constantly flooded with huge amounts of bright natural light.

Saw a Twitter-sized version of the photo above, and if I hadn't heard the news previously I wouldn't even have noticed anything amiss. So, that's a good thing I guess?

I look forward to The Sims 5 in Frostbite.

Bought the Pebberley Beach DLC for Two Point Hospital. At $10 or so for 3 maps, it's objectively pretty poor value, but the game scratches an a persistent itch in the way nothing else around does at the moment, so I paid it. Also let my Humble Monthly sub go through solely for Mutant Year Zero, though I don't plan to play it just yet. Almost certainly going to pause it this month though since AC Origins is a nothing game for me.

If it was just DA3 but with co-op enabled I'd totally be into it. But just like Bethesda, they don't understand that we just want a small-scale 2-4 player experience with friends, not the entire world. Only Larian seems to get that.

Eyyy. Feels like 5 years since I last read the WOT board too.

Presumably they were referring to modern Bob Dylan, plagued by plagiarism controversies and winning retrospective awards only for stuff done decades ago.

Borderlands is a series I think I might be able to enjoy if it had no loot or any sort of inventory system at all, really. Fun art style, interesting classes, presumably solid shooting mechanics and physics, and all optimised for co-op which is my bag. I just hate inventory management.

Yeah, going from a TN panel to another TN panel isn't going to yield meaningful improvements in colour accuracy. That's not to say that the panels will perform identically, but you're still going to be limited by the inherent weaknesses of the technology. It's also possible that the AOC comes with better out-of-the-box settings than your old Asus, but I wouldn't bet on it at this price range. I'd also consider investing in a colorimeter, something like this Colormunki or SpyderX Pro would be decent mid-range options. That said, the value of one goes up the more monitors you have, as colour matching is rather more important if you're using more than one display at the same time since it's nearly impossible to get them to match up just by eyeballing the settings. P.S. When choosing between VA or IPS, you will generally find that IPS has better colours but VA has deeper blacks. This is why VA is generally preferred in TVs.

Haven't followed this whole kerfuffle too closely, but it's no surprise. I find myself thinking about what the best BioWare game of the past decade is and - oh god, it's SWTOR isn't it? I find that somewhat telling. Wind back to the decade previous and it's a lot more open. BG2 and ME1 are the jewels in the crown. I guess KoTOR has a shout I suppose but I'm not as hot on it personally. That said, I'm very lukewarm about NWN and DA1 so I won't pretend it was a hit factory even then.

Somehow I missed the initial hints that this might be happening so it's a complete bolt from the blue for me. Which makes it all the more pleasurable. And yes, they should do this for their entire back-catalogue of games. Get Microsoft to fund it by telling them it'll make it easier to port to Windows Phone. I assume the motivation behind this is that Josh can now age in turn-based time.

Judging from 2K's track record, it will be on GOG, sometime around 2025-2030.

Will the CE come with a leather bag?

It's been a longer gap between the release of Alpha Protocol and New Vegas to now than it was between those same games and when the studio was founded. That's how long I've been waiting for another game with Obsidian writing but with a gameplay style I actually could enjoy. Needless to say, I'm absolutely rapt.

Not fussed about the setting and not fussed about where the camera is. I don't care if it drives like 2D Fallout, 3D Fallout, The Witcher, or Deus Ex. But one thing I feel I'm done with is parties. I want a game based around a solo or near-solo experience, at most with optional companions who would be mostly autonomous, just like in the aforementioned games (and I suspect I'd only keep them around as far as necessary for their quests, and abandon them immediately thereafter).

And shortly after we colonise Alpha Centauri, we'll be able to fly there in Star Citizen as well.

Looks like I logged back in here at the right time, missed all the doom and gloom over the buyout and now have a new game to look forward to.

Maybe the forum software will finally be updated?

I'm back in WoW too, sort of, but not really. Noticed a few of my old guildies were back, some after absences of several years, so I figured I'd pop in and shoot the breeze a little. Didn't cost me anything because I bought the expansion with gold (a little 500k gold will do it), so I figured why not. Hit 120 yesterday. Story is still the same old, constantly being forced to stand still like a slackjawed idiot while the villains monologue then walk away. WoW writing in general feels like a bored DM running the same module for the umpteenth time, just changing the names every time to keep it "fresh". And to top it all off, I restart my dungeoneering career by doing 6-year old dungeons because it's Timewalking weekend. Still, it's good to see my old guild still alive and mostly functional after all these years. An old bank guild we converted into a raiding guild way back in 2007 - god, has it really been 11 years now? My gaming hours are no longer compatible with our raid times but I might tag along to a few farm raids when the opportunity comes along. Taking it purely on a month-to-month basis for sure.

I don't use wireless headphones myself, but I do rate InnerFidelity's Wall of Fame, which is constantly updated and is happy to recommend headphones from $20 to $5000. Their wireless headphone recommendations are here and it looks like all four options meet your criteria.

Wired controllers again.

Absolutely does, the optimal design for a training room is to cover every inch of wall with the posters ...then put an encyclopaedia bookcase in front of every poster. And then stick an anatomy model everywhere else.

Yes, like Theme Hospital before it, the patient cycle goes like this: Receptionist > GP > Diagnosis Room (random) > GP > Other Diagnosis Room (random) > GP > (repeat until 100% diagnosed or you run out of different diagnosis rooms) > GP > Treatment To minimise GP queues, you therefore want each Diagnosis room to be as effective as possible - i.e. the ones that increase the diagnosis percentage by the most each use. Well actually, the ideal case is that your GPs are all highly trained and can diagnose a patient instantly, but that only works for the easiest diseases unless you're abusing the medicine cabinets. Take the following scenarios: 1) GP > Treatment. Obviously ideal but for this to work in all cases you essentially have to exploit the game. Medicine cabinets give a flat stacking 1% diagnosis power in a GP's office. Make a large GPs office with 100 cabinets in it and skip having to build any diagnosis rooms. 2) GP > Powerful diagnosis > GP > Treatment. This is generally what you want to aim for. If the GP sends the patient to somewhere like the X-Ray first, there's a good chance they won't need any further diagnosis, so this is the most efficient, non-gamey method. However the diagnosis room the GP sends the patient to appears to be random, so they might get sent to a weak diagnosis room like a Psychiatrist (awful) or the Ward (weak but reasonably efficient due to the parallelism). Nothing you can do about the RNG unfortunately, which leads to.... 3) GP > Weak diagnosis > GP > More diagnosis > GP > etc. This is an awful situation to be in because it blows out the queues for the GPs, which many people try to solve by simply spamming more GPs offices and before too long you end up with a completely unmanageable mess. Due to the RNG system mentioned, you absolutely do not want to build Cardio or General Diagnosis rooms once you have access to the better ones. They'll just spiral your hospital out of control. Unfortunately it's harder to avoid building the dual-purpose rooms unless you want to reject all patients that require treatment in them. The Ward and Psychiatry are both required for so many diseases that it's impractical to not build them, so you just have to accept their diagnostic inefficiency. I find having a couple of Fluid Analysis and X-Ray machines to be a good enough approach. Fluid Analysis is great because it's staffed by nurses which are less in-demand than doctors, and X-Ray is easier than the Mega-scanner because you don't need any specials skills to operate it. I would advise steering clear of the DNA Lab though, and just send home anyone who needs one for treatment. It's not required anywhere near as often as the other two, requires a special skill on the doctor operating it, and the doctor is inherently going to be compromised by there not being any levels to the Genetics skill. Nurses can get Ward Management level 5 which increases both diagnosis and treatment effectiveness of the Ward by 100%. Likewise, Doctors can get Psychiatry level 5 which does the same for the Psychiatry. Training a doctor for the DNA Lab means giving them the Genetics skill which doesn't do anything other than allowing them to work there, and then the best you can do is give them level 2 in both Diagnosis and Treatment skills, for a grand total of 20% added effectiveness. This is a horrible deal. EDIT: You want the vast majority of your doctors trained fully in the GP skill still (up to +75% effectiveness). A few will take full Treatment skill instead, then 2-3 of them with Diagnosis level 4 plus Radiology, which gives +60% effectiveness to the X-Ray and +40% to the Mega-scanner. For nurses, I don't like the inflexibility of the Injection or Pharmacy skills, and prefer to go full Treatment instead for them. You'll need some full Diagnosis ones for the Fluid Analysis rooms, and full Ward Management for the Ward ones. It's not obvious, but you can assign multiple nurses to the same Ward using the menu that pops up when you click the door.

44 hours in total now. I do admit though, building GPs is getting really old. The copy rooms functionality went live today after being in beta for the past few days. It's great. However, spamming GPs is symptomatic of a deep problem in the entire diagnosis model used in the game, which, to put it simply, is kinda borked. All diagnosis rooms do the exact same thing, just to different levels of effectiveness. This means you never want to build basic diagnosis rooms once you've unlocked advanced ones, but when it comes to the rooms doing double duty as both diagnosis and treatment, you're kinda boned. You kind of just have to accept the unnecessary volume of traffic the idiot GPs send through to your wards and psychs (and don't build the DNA room at all unless required for an objective). The issue is of course exacerbated by the difficulty of getting - or more accurately, training - qualified staff. Not being able to unlearn skills is a huge problem because you're then stuck with having to train unqualified staff from the ground up. It's just a very annoying form of mix-maxing all up. For what it's worth, I just tackled the third last hospital last night, Rotting Hill. It actually ended up being one of the easier hospitals once you cynically game the mechanics. 8 GPs, 2 Fluid Analysis and 2 X-Rays were my only dedicated diagnosis rooms, alongside 2 Wards and 3 Psychs. No Cardio rooms, no General Diagnosis, no DNA room and no Mega-scan. On the one hand, it was somewhat satisfying to run a smooth hospital with almost no queue alerts. On the other, it's disappointing to see how the entire game's diagnosis model can just be gamed like that, by not even building over half the room types. One thing I think would help in the interim is a toggle for every dual-purpose room to either allow it to be used for diagnosis-only, treatment-only, or both.