Humanoid

I have a soft spot for Tenebrae in U8 and enjoyed exploring it as much as Britain in U7. If only the rest of the game was built like it. As for already-mentioned cities. Sleeping Dogs' rendition of Hong Kong is a great call, it did to me what any Saints Row or GTA game completely failed to do. Novigrad was so alive that I enjoyed just slow walking across it to do my business. Probably the common factor in these choices is that each is constructed as a whole, single entity, as opposed to being cut down into smaller pieces like in most IE games. Sure most of the city might be functionally useless, but I feel the inclusion of those parts is valuable nonetheless.

I really liked the bit in SR3 where you're just driving around in a car with Pierce while singing together (badly). Games often struggle to convey the idea of friendship between characters, and this little scene managed that perfectly. For an actual gameplay thing, killing Ragnaros for the first time in vanilla WoW would certainly qualify, way back in September 2005 if I remember right. By the end of that fight my hands were shaking so much that I could be mistaken for a Parkinson's sufferer. What made it sweeter is managing to pull off a ninja jumper-cable resurrection on a healer by vanishing and switching trinkets midfight. Other memorable moments: - Being exploded into pieces by Beren in Ultima 8. As a sheltered kid, I'd never seen that level of violence in a videogame before. The feeling when I managed to exact my revenge by recreating this method of drowning him filled me with warm fuzzies. (To this day I'm still pretty uncomfortable with all that blood and gore stuff. A few years later I was similarly shocked by Fallout's default level of violence, and proceeded to turn it down to the minimum setting.) - Wing Commander 4 FMV. Technically my first FMV game was probably Return to Zork (bundled with a Sound Blaster), and I suppose Rebel Assault sort of had it (same), but I never had a PC able to run WC3 until after the next game was released. Seeing the opening cutscene for the first time was an amazing experience. "Multimedia" PC had been a buzzword for some time before that, but this for me was what finally delivered on the concept. (Shame about the missiles, after a while I ended up just turning invulnerability on and finishing the game that way) - Winding back even further, I remember struggling to play SimFarm on a 286. It chugged, and the graphics were significantly compromised on an EGA graphics card. Then my dad got a DX2 486 laptop (supposedly a work laptop), and I was amazed at the difference it made running the game. Sure, the laptop's trackball is awful, and the screen was a DSTN monochrome panel, but never mind that, it was amazing all the same. There was a time in my life where SimFarm was my favourite game of all time, so it was a big deal in context.

Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations. It's ...not great, the gimmicks (mostly reused from the other campaigns) don't really serve a purpose, recruitment is all over the place with character levels seemingly decided by a random number generator. It all feels rather slapdash, which I suppose isn't surprising since it's the final campaign, presumably developed last. Ah well. Started raiding a little in WoW again. Emerald Nightmare is a mixed bag. I have to say that it definitely feels a bit like a stopgap, cheaply made filler content made with minimal effort (this is becoming a theme in this post). The bosses themselves are fine, and I appreciate that it has a more reasonable difficulty curve than WoD raids did, where later normal mode bosses were harder than early heroic bosses. On the other hand, the layout is shocking, you start in a room, which is followed by a long corridor, which ends in four teleporters to rooms made out of old assets, just with a red paintjob. Whereas Highmaul, the equivalent raid in WoD, felt like an intelligently designed area (being an ogre city), Emerald Nightmare is pretty much "okay, we've designed a bunch of bosses, now stick each of them in a room and call it done."

When I ended up having to install Mankind Divided on my system partition because it was the only one with enough space left, I had the realisation I should probably do something about that. Either I'd have to clean up all the games I had installed but hadn't played for years and thus were uselessly taking up precious space, or I could just add more space. Naturally, I took the latter option. Out goes my 250GB Samsung 840 EVO and in comes a 960GB Sandisk Ultra II. I've now copied over my Steam library, which had previously been spread out over three different disks. I also impulse-bought a Filco Majestouch 2 Tenkeyless keyboard with Black switches. Not my switch of preference, but in what I suspect was a pricing error, it was priced at somewhere between a third and a half of what the other models were going for. At that price I couldn't resist, though I'm doubtful it'll end up as my main keyboard unless this Tenkeyless thing that I've never tried before turns out to be an epiphany. Just checking now and the price has been hiked from $102AUD to $269AUD so I guess my assumption about a pricing error was correct, but I've gotten a shipping notification (this is an eBay store) so all should be well. (Blues are $224, Browns $239 and Reds $287 so prices are all over the place admittedly)

Even in the context of other party-based RPGs, Wasteland is a bit of a reach for me because it has no real concept of a player character: you are the whole party. I just couldn't get into that mindset, and it's the difference between Fallout and Wasteland. It's for the same reason that I couldn't get into most of the RPGs of the past - series like the Gold Box games, Might and Magic, Wizardry, etc, I just can't get into.

Maybe the dock is just a gigantic heatsink and the CPU will overclock itself when placed on it.

Anyone familiar with the GOG version of Bloodlines able to compare it to the disc version? Other than that there's nothing to catch my eye just yet. I know a fair few of you are positive about Grim Dawn, but then it's the current Humble Monthly where for less money you get that and a bunch of other mystary games. GOG Connect only yielded me X Gold. Makes me think of XTree Gold.

The only good ones are the top-down co-op spinoffs.

7nm in itself makes it sound very made-up, even if they're talking 2018 a lot would have to go right considering it took upwards of four years just to get away from 28nm.

I've played resto druid for maybe 30-40% of my time in WoW. Haven't healed at all in Legion, but looking at the current list of abilities now as compared to WoD, not a lot has changed since then. General play is to roll Lifebloom (doesn't stack anymore) on the tank, liberally apply Rejuvenation on anyone for general damage (which can be stacked twice if necessary) and keep a healing circle (I forget the name) under either the tanks or the melee pile. Spot heal with Regrowth, and use Wild Growth for periods of heavy AoE damage. Nature's Swiftness is gone but Swiftmend fulfils its role as it no longer requires an active HoT on the target. Tranquility still works as it always has.

There's casual raiding guilds, you know? With flex mode it's easy to just have a team of 10 core raiders and have like 20 people who join whenever they want. I mean, you might not do great but it's there. Yeah, it's great because I can take lengthy hiatuses these days and not have to wonder whether everything will collapse while I'm gone. I play less than half the amount I used to at WoW's peak but having had taken breaks of 1 year (second half of WoD) and 2.5 years (the end of Cataclysm and the entirety of Pandas) I can resubscribe anytime and the core of my old guild - one I had co-founded back in 2007 - will still be there.

Aside, just heard that there was a pretty spectacular rooster-up with WoW's loot algorithm. If you already had a piece of "legendary" loot, you were more likely to obtain further pieces of other legendary loot. Rich get richer, and all that. It all started as a conspiracy theory with the usual dismissal of "random loot is random" etc, but it turned out to be true and they've got themselves in quite the bind, especially as the increased chance is apparently very significant. Something like less than a quarter of the eligible playerbase having one, but of those who do have at least one, a clear majority of them have more than one. From a programming perspective, you'd suspect they silently had a system to either increase the chance for people who had yet to get one, or one to reduce the chance for someone who already own one. This is why you need to quickly learn to differentiate '<' from '>' kids.

WoW has never done a server crunch, I suspect because it's the kind of thing that looks bad from a marketing perspective. There are some extremely depopulated servers out there, but the solution they've gone with is "connected realms" where you're nominally on separate servers, but can see and interact with people on one to three different servers and share the same AH. Azjol-Nerub is connected with Khaz Modan, so you could potentially see someone called "Gfted-Khaz Modan" running around. That said, my opinion of Legion is fairly lukewarm compared to most. I'm not done levelling yet, but the experience so far is pretty much a rerun of the previous expansion. Not necessarily a bad thing given WoD started off strong, but nothing that would necessarily suggest this expansion will turn out better, other than promises we don't yet know will be fulfilled.

Well, maybe the colour coded random-stat loot. Didn't like that aspect of the game, but at least when I found a decent weapon I could hold onto it for a reasonable length of time and not have to think too hard about it.

'Adventure with up to 4 friends'. This signals MMO design choices for me. Can't actually remember if this was in the first reboot game, if it was then I guess it's not so pronounced, which is a good thing for me at least. It allowed two-player co-op by default, but let each player control two party members each. Mods quickly allowed for four player co-op and it was such an obvious move that it's just implemented by default in the sequel. Really the puzzle is why they didn't do it the first time around.

Besides the underlined "<monopoly?> get out of jail card" it's just a list of other mundane items the person was carrying, I can make out e-cigarette and car keys.

Well, the second most common piece of standard advice perhaps, behind "git gud".

Theoretically that might be the only way to ensure a level playing field, however the reason we don't do that is that doping is a public health issue. The current testing regime at least restricts flagrant abuse of the most experimental, untested and dangerous PEDs, especially as these drugs are often the type in which side effects may not manifest until years or decades down the track. As compromised as the current system is, it's at least better than the worst excesses of the 90s where incidences of fertility issues, certain types of cancer and heart failure have since come to light. Some may argue that the athletes are mature functioning adults who are responsible for their own decisions, but many doping programs operate at a team or even national level, and some of the competitors are indeed not yet legally adults. At the risk of being a "think of the children" reactionary, we already know that youth coaches are starting doping programs very early on, sometimes with tacit approval from success-hungry parents. Professional sports teams likewise through their academies recruit these kids into a highly pressurised environment which raises them into a culture where PED use is the norm. It's no surprise that many end up exhibiting a rather skewed sense of ethics even when caught red-handed, because by now that behaviour is normalised, the drugs part of the job. And no, just because these things are already happening doesn't mean we should relinquish control altogether. The war on doping may be unwinnable, but as long as the current keeps away the worst excesses and abuses, it's worth keeping.

Yeah, my experience with FF7 was with the shoddy PC port as well which would have coloured my experience. The 3D acceleration was only possible under 3dfx Glide so I had to sit through the very slow software rendering, which was particularly problematic when summon spells were involved. A later patch supported 3D acceleration for the nVidia Riva 128 but it was far from polished. The game also famously came with a sizable portion of the controls mapped to the numpad by default. If you didn't have a numpad, then like many laptop owners found, you had to wait for a later patch to let you remap the keys before launching the game because while it was possible to rebind keys ....you needed access to the numpad in the first place to do that.

Yeah, I'm talking more about professional sports in general. There's a common fallacy that PEDs don't benefit certain sports because of the nature of the skillset required. This doesn't stand up to any real scrutiny, and it can be noted that use of beta-blockers is rife in the sport of chess for example, to improve concentration. To return to Serena's TUEs for example, you will find that they were authorised by one Dr Stuart Miller, supposedly the head of the ITF's anti-doping department. In reality he's one of the worst enablers in the sport, and has made a number of notorious and indefensible comments. No one could seriously look at that and not believe the TUE system is utterly ripe for abuse, never mind the conflict of interest of a governing body policing itself while also handling the commercial side of the sport. This trickles down to the layman who them makes such claims as "oh this sport is a game of skill, drugs won't help here". EPO, one of the most infamous and effective endurance-enhancing PEDs, won't meaningfully improve performances in a sport that regularly has 5-set slogathons? The same argument is made by football (soccer) fans who conveniently ignore the physical demands of running up and down the pitch for 90 minutes. Take two players of equal natural talent and the doper will completely demolish the clean athlete over any non-trivial length of time based on endurance alone, let alone when you take enhancements of speed, strength and mental abilities into account. EDIT: I know I've digressed quite a lot from the specific topic of US-based Olympic doping, and I apologise for that. However I do note that for the "big" sports like tennis and football, Olympic doping regimes tend to be inseparable from what the same athletes do in their other 3 years and 11 months, so making a distinction is less useful here than it is, say, for track-and-field athletes for which the Olympics are definitively the crowning focus. For the latter I suspect doping regimes being conducted on a national federation level like that of the Russians comes into play.

Yes, a TUE is, from a legal perspective, a defense to using these otherwise prohibited substances. The system for granting these exemptions is full of holes however, and if you take the population of athletes as being anywhere near that of the population of large, you get some very alarming trends, such as a clear majority of tennis players and cyclists worldwide being asthmatic (at a rate of up to 80%). Lance Armstrong famously produced a backdated TUE granted by a "co-operative" doctor to explain away a cortisone positive in '98, after publicly announcing just one week earlier that he was not taking any medications and so had no TUEs. It's a system with no integrity and is full of exploitable loopholes, one that requires at the very least a complete overhaul of the exemptions framework that wouldn't be able to grant said exemptions at the very low level of authority at which they're currently available. Serena Williams has ongoing TUEs for oxycodone, hydromorphone, prednisone, prednisolone and methylprednisolone. Sure, we can shrug our shoulders and say "she has an exemption for all of them, move on". It doesn't pass the sniff test, however, nor do any of her performances over the years.

Yeah, the use of PEDs amongst professional athletes is the rule rather than the exception, and the rate amongst successful athletes is very likely 100%. This cannot be considered a surprise to any reasonable person, so the battle being fought is largely that of public perception. Therein lies the values of leaks like this, or of other external actions like police raids - anything that happens outside of the control of sport's compromised governing bodies. Outside of big "shocks" like this, the status quo remains that of eternally wilful ignorance. The use of doping controls these days tends to be to ensure no one goes completely over-the-top crazy with it, because having athletes drop like flies is bad for business. Aside from that, carry on.

Everyone using Roman numerals over the last page or so is really discombobulating. For the record, I've only ever played FF7, and it was fine, I finished it, but wasn't sufficiently impressed to go on and play other games in the series.

Well after they got away with that IGN reporter "cameo" in ME3 I guess this is just the natural next step in ensuring their actors are as unqualified as possible.

I don't really know his specific role, no, but I'd imagine he'd still have high level creative control over all of their products. Something akin to what Sid Meier does, or what MCA used to do, perhaps. That said, I've never really played any Blizzard games other than WoW so I'm not the best placed to try and identify similarities between their various franchises creatively.