Humanoid

I'm happy with my recently-acquired PS4 Pro but by god, the physical design of the console is spectacularly crap, and changing the plastic of which it's made won't change that. Unwieldy shape, completely invisible disc slot, barely visible, flimsy and tiny power and eject buttons, hidden USB ports... I don't know what they were thinking when they designed this thing.

I remember an old interview during the time of XCOM 1 where they explained the inverted difficulty curve was somewhat intended, because the retry cost for failing a campaign late in the game was crippling, whereas if you failed early it was no big deal to start afresh. With the ability to save scum (unless you play ironman), I don't know why that would matter? I pretty much create a new save after every mission, so if one wipes me out, I won't have to start again just to get back to that point. Ironman is the one true path!

I remember an old interview during the time of XCOM 1 where they explained the inverted difficulty curve was somewhat intended, because the retry cost for failing a campaign late in the game was crippling, whereas if you failed early it was no big deal to start afresh.

So I didn't even know Razer (manufacturer of flashy but somewhat questionable-quality gaming accessories) operated a game store. But they do, and they have a gimmick where they have four selected games a week where you get $15 back as a store voucher. Overcooked 2 released just yesterday and is one of the selected games. You can get it for 25% off which is decent but not particularly remarkable. But then you can get another 10% off with code RGSITAD18AUG10, and then if you use the $15 credit (it's good for one month) for something else, you've basically bought a new release game for well under $5. That's an amazing deal. https://gamestore.razer.com/lp/razer-exclusives (The other selected games this week are Dragon Ball FighterZ, Bioshock Collection, and GTA5, but I have no idea how competitive those prices are) Note: The $15 voucher requires a $30 minimum spend in addition to the aforementioned one month expiry, but the prices on the store seem pretty much the same as anywhere else that sells Steam keys, so it shouldn't be hard to find something to spend it on.

And often they don't even have the decency to come with the already-planned DLC. As for the topic, I've never sold a thing, games or otherwise. I have all my 90s big game boxes somewhere in my parents' garage. Now that I have my own place I should probably move them here - only issue is that it's about a 700km trip.

Zwift means you can remove the quotation marks here. Needs a smart trainer though so the price of entry is pretty steep. Still, not much more than some other gaming accessories...

I only bought BG2 because I had a $20 Electronics Boutique voucher from a PC gaming magazine that I needed to use that month. I wonder if I'd even be posting here right now if that never happened, because I registered for the BIS forums to follow IWD2 which came afterwards. That of course only because I ended up liking BG2 way more than I expected to. Not a game I could play today though, my tastes have changed far too much in the intervening years. God, it's been almost 20 years since BG2. Hold me.

Ultima 7

I tried BG1 sometime after BG2 - probably after IWD2 too, and only got maybe a couple of screens out of Candlekeep. And that was back when I still liked party-based RPGs, something decidedly not the case today.

There's a reason I have several hundred hours in XCOM1 but just the one campaign worth 40 hours or whatever in XCOM 2. Didn't even bother buying the expansion. Granted that's probably not a fair comparison because realistically about 3/4 of the time in XCOM1 was with the Long War mod. Vanilla XCOM I did one normal campaign, one classic campaign, and one classic campaign with the expansion.

Just bomb disposal, which was horrible. Plus some DLC maps. And the escape timer for that one map, you know the one.

I liked playing with the "Perfect Information" setting in Long War because it kinda demonstrated that sometimes seemingly fluky things weren't actually that improbable. And it also puts things into context when I have multiple shots of my own (overwatch mostly, granted) hit at single digit chances. Remember, high cover is a linear -40% to hit chances and low cover is a piddly -20%. It's easy to overestimate the value of cover.

Can't be crit if you hunker down. Can't be hit if you're out of sight. Point blank shots won't miss, neither will grenades. XCOM has a lot of RNG but you also have a lot of tools to avoid leaving things to RNG.

There's also legendary Aussie actor Vernon Wells.

Never played either Zelda nor Dark Souls. I do like how the guy on the cover of Dark Souls 3 is giving a cheery thumbs-up though.

The Australian lifestyle is fine and I have no real complaints. The only real dampener is the relative isolation, making travel rather expensive and time consuming. To that end, I'd love to settle in Western Europe, which has a similar standard of living but with the bonus of having everything nice and close together.

It all seems a bit grim, grey and depressing to me. Nintendo and Ubisoft should make a Mario+Rabbids version of Dark Souls just like they did XCOM.

I still remember a childhood nightmare where I was in an undulating cartoon landscape being chased by axe-wielding McDonald's Fry Guys. Don't ask me how they managed to wield axes while lacking arms.

Maybe they should do a temporary job swap. Have some cameras follow them around in their new jobs too and sell it as a reality TV show.

The best parts of Deus Ex were just toodling around in the cities doing sidequests though. Screw the main quest "dungeons".

The full-fat Football Manager games are way too complicated for me these days, I'm not interested in fluff like team talks and micromanaging training. The stripped-down FM Touch version is pretty reasonable though, level of detail is about right for me.

It's a can of air, there's not much to be dissatisfied about so don't put too much stock in customer reviews for air. It can be misused of course so be careful to immobilise the fans so they don't move (just stick a pen to hold the blades in place) and let the can sit for a bit when it starts to freeze up.

Nighthawk over Raptor any day. It's like Thief sneaking vs Skyrim sneaking.

We're talking about a man who released a game for the 486 back when the most anyone had was a 386.

Heresy, first aid is a very handy skill, both in PvE and PvP, hard to use but is one of those things that it's always worth a try - especially when bubbling as a pally, why waste mana in that instance. Just odd to move it to tailors, but I guess that'll be something I can sell. Storywise, they say this is to resolve the Horde-Alliance conflict, not sure what that means, maybe they will do Cataclysm 2.0 I don't think I've bandaged myself since Vanilla. Gotta have those bandages, Whipper Root Tuber and Night Dragon's Breath since obviously priest mana is far too valuable to waste on rogues. Been hard to justify filling up my always-too-full bag space since then. Granted, I haven't PvPed since, like, 2008. WoW's faction model is viable because of the sheer size of the playerbase, but it often feels like they have to go out of their way to continue justifying that design in spite of the story direction. Bit of cart-pulling-the-horse about it these days. The worst thing about the split is arguably how many other MMOs blindly copied the same model, resulting in both factions of their much-smaller games being complete graveyards of people who can't play alongside each other. The games might have failed anyway, but it certainly would accelerate the death spiral. Just desserts perhaps, but it boggles the mind that developers of a new game in a saturated niche could think that splitting their players and not letting them meaningfully interact with each other is a good idea.