Humanoid

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. :|

This is where you buy a Nintendo Switch and surreptitiously play PoE2 on it at work.

I came into it late - and indeed into PC gaming fairly late since we only had a 286 with EGA graphics until around '94 or '95. Got a DX4/100 at that point, and a Creative bundle containing a Sound Blaster 16, double-speed CD-ROM drive and a over a dozen games. That bundle changed my life. SimCity 2000 Rebel Assault Return to Zork Iron Helix Ultima 8 Wing Commander 2 Syndicate Plus Strike Commander Railroad Tycoon Civilization Silent Service 2 F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 I might even be forgetting some titles there.

Hey, SO2 lets you blow up space stations *with nuclear missiles*.

I've run multiple displays for some years now, but it figures that it takes a game like ETS2 to make me try using them for Eyefinity gaming for the first time ever. The experience doesn't necessarily translate into screenshots, however, which indeed look peculiarly Escheresque. (Click for larger but still shrunk version)

You can totally use a keyboard with all modern consoles. If a specific game doesn't support it, then that's on the developer of that game (or whichever company they used to handle the porting) because the infrastructure support is there.

Hopefully when I get my Switch (waiting for a good price) I'll use it more than my toaster. I don't think I've even used my toaster for 3-4 years now at least (nor have I bought a loaf of bread in that time).

I want to install Promods, which is like, *the* mod for ETS2. But to do that I need the France expansion. And that's full price from everywhere at the moment, despite the Italy expansion having just been released. So either I have to roll back my patch version to install an older version of the mod, or I have to buy a full price title, unheard of in this day and age. It's like Skyrim mods requiring Dawnguard all over again.

A quick Google shows that a NWN EE patch about a month ago broke the sound for some people. Dunno if it's been resolved yet but it may well be it's just a game bug that you're encountering.

Playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 for the first time since (according to the timestamp on my saves) 2013. I bought the Scandinavia expansion years ago but this is my first time playing with it. First thing to note is that Sweden, your road signs are ugly. Second thing is that my former top-of-the-line truck is now apparently obsolete. God, it's just like the WoW gear grind.

I'm too used to these multi-year Kickstarter development times, I had no idea Deadfire release was even imminent. If someone made me guess, I would have said early next year. Welp, guess that settles it, there is no chance of my playing PoE1 before Deadfire releases, and if I'm honest with myself, I think the odds are I'll never play it at all. And ah, Arcomage. Like Gwent, it was popular enough to be later sold as a standalone product, though I don't recall ever actually seeing it on shelves. Probably a more successful follow-up to MM7 than MM8 was.

Maybe in a decade or two we'll see them finally sell a complete release of The Sims.

The finest piece of music ever composed. EDIT: Midi version as heard ingame -

OG Sidewinder gamepad for mine.

BG2 was a good game but I thought the map was one of its biggest flaws. Not one that realistically could be solved, but how it compartmentalised everything really hurt the sense of scale of the game. Somehow a supposedly grand city feels remarkably small when condensed down to just the gameplay-relevant points of interest. Give me a seamless, singular world every time - my nominations would be titles like Ultima 7, Sleeping Dogs and The Witcher 3. Skyrim's overworld was good but the countless generic dungeons compromise it.

I started my three week holiday with grand designs of playing supposed epics like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey on my sister's Switch before buying my own later on this year. Now, on the final day of my holiday, I can say I've played about an hour of them, combined. Not because of any particular dislike, it's just that I found I'd much rather play co-op games, and so my time was occupied by such titles as Octodad, Guacamelee, Overcooked and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. EDIT: I also tried that Project Octopath demo. I was hugely sceptical because of the "from the makers of Bravely Default" marketing - I couldn't get myself to enjoy that game at all. But this new effort is actually pretty good. I mean, the writing is still the standard agency-free JRPG fare, but at least there are no insufferable child protagonists, no weird chibi representations in cutscenes, and it has a far more sensible combat system.