Humanoid

Speakers last much longer than the electronics within. I don't like powered speakers for this reason, you fry the amplifier section and end up having to toss out otherwise perfectly good speakers. Instead, you can buy yourself some regular bookshelf speakers, probably better ones for the same price, and a T-amp (with or without DAC), and the speakers will last until you die. Bookshelf speakers you have the choice of thousands and it would be impractical to make a specific recommendation - I'd visit your local hi-fi shop and have a listen to what they have. Amps are plentiful too. I use a Topping VX1 DAC-AMP with my PC but it lacks a subwoofer out, it runs about $100. The VX2 model might be preferable if you don't need a headphone output (it also gains an optical input in exchange for any sort of analogue input). I use an SMSL Q5 Pro with my bedroom setup and that does has a sub out, as well as remote control, about $140. If you don't need a DAC, the companies above produce standalone amps too. At the very bottom of the range simple T-Amp from Lepai/Lepy can be had for $20 or so and will sound just as good at low-to-medium volumes (but will distort sooner when you crank it up). EDIT: Just looking at Amazon prices, the R-15PM is $450 and the otherwise identical passive model, the R-15M is $181. That's ridiculous. EDIT2: The subwoofer decision will partly drive your speaker selection too so you should bear that in mind when shopping. I don't use a sub so I use the larger (basically standmount size) Monitor Audio Bronze 2 for my PC. But with a sub, I'd be plenty happy with the compact Bronze 1. Best value compact option might be something like the Q Acoustics 2010 (superseded by the 3010 but still available). 2020/3020 is the larger option.

Only just got my boat. Given that I'm playing on Story Mode, this is the first time I actually have to learn any of the game mechanics, hmm. One fun thing is that I haven't even opened my inventory since they very start. I wonder if my default gun and clothes will let me survive to the end of the game.

The thing that's impressed me most is that there's a wading-in-water animation.

Aw man, now literally everyone I know that plays WoW has access to beta except me. Legion is the only beta I got into, and I promptly ignored it. Dunno why I even got an invite, I'd been inactive a good while. Incidentally this month marks a year since I last logged in.

I haven't always had the best experience with Galaxy, but decided to risk it and it worked fine, plenty fast enough to saturate my connection. Going to dive right into it, Story mode baby! P.S. Had no idea that we were going to play the same character until the intro played just now. EDIT: I can't exit stage left, what is this, Mario? EDIT 2: It tells me if I want a custom save I can do it from the main menu, but of course I can't even get to the main menu from here. *sigh* Alt-F4.

So if you want to play classic Nintendo games on your Switch you will now have to pay for an ongoing subscription. Yep, sure Nintendo I'm sure people will do that over using alternate means.

Just one step away from dressing like Sean Connery in Zardoz.

They didn't, turns out the entire genre is just a prank they played on the west.

Fire Emblem is not an RPG really, it's more like, uh, XCOM-lite? But with romance between missions. Some people like to call the genre SRPG but I think that's a nonsensical term.

I'm not much better in that the last JRPG I finished was FF7, and Super Mario RPG before that. I asked a similar sort of question to this back when I bought my 3DS, got a few recommendations (for multiple consoles), but to be truthful none of them really stuck. Bravely Default I found tedious and the characters mostly unlikeable. Trails in the Sky lost me on the usual rat-slaying tutorial. Secret of Mana was an unpleasant grind. That said, I tried the Octopath demo on my sister's Switch a few months back and I admit it looked fairly promising. Feels like it got right exactly what Bravely Default got wrong, even though they have a superficially similar approach of saving up turns. That, plus the characters (so far) aren't insufferable and entitled little kids. (The full game isn't out until July)

I usually play a thief so it tends to be low-key, fairly minimalistic stuff. Not "Hey everyone, I'm a thief" stuff, but civilian kinda stuff. Like just about anyone, I still like to be pretty of course, but not so much about the hourglass shape. Besides, being a thief, I find all the bikini armour is heavy armour and I couldn't equip any of it even if I wanted to.

Reusing the Arcanum IP doesn't really add anything to any potential follow-up. I mean, if anything it might be a millstone, creating a sense of obligation to stick with its many many poorly designed elements. It's a game more suited to a spiritual successor that can be a bit more liberal with changing up the formula. Now it can often be worth recycling old IPs for the marketing benefit associated with name recognition, but I don't think Arcanum was ever popular enough to make it worth the drawbacks. Consider by way of contrast a hypothetical Baldur's Gate 3. The commercial upside would be absolutely huge, and far outweigh the annoyance of being obligated to go by D&D rules.

Can you even buy 1080p OLEDs anymore? Haven't seen them for a couple years now. All consumer OLED TVs use LG panels so the difference is in the electronics doing the image processing. In the end though, the image ends up fairly similar between all three of LG, Panasonic and Sony. Image retention is a physical phenomenon and as such will behave more or less identically between all three as a result, but this is not a typical concern as you pretty much have to intentionally abuse the TV for it to become a problem (i.e. running 100% brightness at all times, when a properly calibrated display should be about half that). Between the three, the Sony is more expensive because, y'know, Sony. So I've been weighing up the entry level Panasonic vs LG recently, and I note a few common traits: - The Panasonic is better calibrated out of the box, so if you don't plan to do calibration on your own, the Panasonic has the more accurate image. - LG supports Dolby Vision, Panasonic does not. The usefulness of this depends on what media you watch, of course. - Panasonic's Smart TV functionality is based on the discontinued Firefox OS and is fairly outdated compared to the functionality other brands offer. - Panasonic historically has better customer support in the event of any faults. - EDIT: Panasonic had a minor stutter issue, this has been corrected with a firmware fix as of February this year. Bear in mind too that new models typically release mid-year - indeed the new models have been announced - so there may be good opportunities to grab a good discount soon on last year's models. EDIT: To clarify, the models being discussed here are the Panasonic EZ950 and the LG B7 or C7 which are the current entry level models available to purchase, at least where I am.

Non-episodic too please.

Visit Europoort in multiplayer ETS2.

I'm finding myself going deeper and deeper into the ETS2 rabbit hole. I bought myself a Logitech G920 wheel and found the rather basic clamping system doesn't work at all with the bevelled and curved front edge of my desk. So a brief trip to the hardware store and a rummage around my garage later and I solved the issue by using a pair of F-clamps to extend my desk using a spare Ikea cabinet door I had lying around. It's a right hassle to install and uninstall, but that's the price of playing sims I guess.

Yeah, my numbers are based on a generic i5 or Ryzen 5 build with 16GB RAM and SATA SSDs. Just a general ballpark of what constitutes a good gaming system for the typical gamer these days. I've barely kept up with any specifics lately because I'm probably a fair few years away from needing to change anything myself.

Don't upgrade, that's a dead-end path especially since you're buying near-obsolete DDR3 RAM. You can get a much faster CPU and motherboard combo, be it Intel or AMD for about $250-300. With 16GB of DDR4 your system spend before SSD will be $400-450. Then buy *two* 1TB SSDs and you get to your $1000 budget. Your video card is still totally fine and still counts as high-end even today, don't touch it. Your existing Win7 licence probably won't activate automatically once you install it on this new PC, but a quick phone call to Microsoft and they'll do it for you, no cost involved. You might need to stretch the truth and say your old hardware broke if they ask.

It's a game I hear so much about but availability is surprisingly spotty for something so highly rated. On the Wii VC but not Wii U, and mysteriously absent on the underwhelming mini-SNES.

Wildly popular, extremely profitable, and immensely overrated? But the Half-Life series is already that. *ducks for cover*

It's dynamic pricing that changes from hour-to-hour but it appears to be in the region of 175-200k per month for US servers. Other regions are more expensive. Live pricing here I took a break from WoW back in May last year, ended up not bothering to come back because I'm playing other stuff most nights now, and with nights reserved that means no raiding, and no reason to play.

Oh wow, just noticed they killed off the gamefaqs.com domain.

As a relative latecomer to the genre, my strategy is based on Ultima 8: keep double-clicking until either you or the enemy falls over dead. Some 25 years later and I've largely come full circle, screw tactics, I just want to get the combat over with and do more interesting things. In the intervening period I've held a number of different opinions on what good RPG combat should look like, but like my fashion choices, they all turned out to be but passing fads.

Neal Hallford tried a survey/petition thing some years ago to gauge interest in a successor. It fell way short, probably due to lack of publicity, so the KS never happened. Doesn't help that his book KS also fell short so he's probably a bit gun-shy at this point. https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/make-a-spiritual-sequel-to-the-hit-crpg-betrayal/

Well, in the meantime I have a T-shirt I can wear I guess. :|