Humanoid

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.

I'm just sick of corruption-this, corruption-that storylines that have been the stock and trade of the series since day one. There's enough corruption in the history of WoW to make any third-world dictator blush. It's not interesting, it's not compelling, it's just lazy. I do admit that the basis of the entire expansion has put me off since the outset though, when the driver behind the whole thing is resurrecting your most recognisable dead villains yet again, you can't help but feel it both cynical and desperate at the same time.

Probably for the best. I started playing Legion a few days ago and the writing is definitely feeling pretty stale. It's a team in need of new ideas instead of clinging to the same old plot points like a security blanket.

Sorry, D:OS, never played Blackguards.

A single level in the game makes a huge difference to player power. In the early game particularly, missing out on XP, for example, by having one character dead during a fight while the rest of the party kills an enemy, is a big deal. This combined with no level scaling at all means you have to be very meticulous in the order in which you tackle the quests, which unfortunately often means just scouting each area and finding the one place where the enemy levels match yours.

It was presented by the Prime Minister himself

I have survived the Death Road and thus been granted Canadian citizenship. The game is in a reasonable state. I'd watched a number of Let's Plays of it before buying it, and though they all failed to a man, I picked up enough useful tips to be able to beat the endgame without losses. I'd still say the final siege is a bit unfair but through stockpiling basically my entire run's worth of ammo and managing to field a full squad near the end, I managed to blast my way through. The FTL comparison is apt because the final battle is really on a different curve to the rest of the game, but if anything I'd say this is a bit fairer than FTL ever was.

Same. For instance, I constantly seemed to run out of biocells my fist time through. This time, I've got 25 in my inventory and haven't had an issue replenishing them. Yeah, Biocells were what I was mostly thinking of, too. I didn't use a single grenade in my first playthrogh, either... I threw a half-dozen during the opening mission alone. None of them intentionally, of course...

Still a more complete product than No Man's Sky.

Sony haven't done anything good with TVs since the Trinitron patent expired.

It's an interesting role reversal since the PS3. Back then Sony were interested in pushing the Blu-ray medium as hard as possible to combat HD DVD, so BD playback was a huge deal. Now that they're the incumbent, I guess that reason goes away. I guess they make more money selling overpriced standalone 4K BD players? MS don't sell those, and therefore have no such compunctions. Not that it matters much for me. I'll go 4K once 4K OLEDs are $2000 and 4K BD players are $100, i.e. about a third of current prices.

Death Road to Canada. I believe it's the first zombie game I've ever bought. I hate the zombie apocalypse genre, but I couldn't resist the novelty of the Oregon Trail-esque gameplay (never mind the fact that as a non-American I've never played Oregon Trail and only became aware of it in the last few years). Prior to playing it I'd watched several (failed) runs on YouTube so I knew what I was getting into, and some basic strategies. Regardless of that though, I'm one failed run in, and in the process of failing another. In my defense, I blame the somewhat floaty movement and iffy directional attacks for most of my deaths thus far, the only one that happened via event being for failing to lift a log (and presumably being crushed by it). Advice given by the game itself and the Internet at large probably isn't working as well for as as the times I play in my habitually methodical way, which in this case involves attempting to kill every single zombie in the vicinity before exploring and looting. It's probably not the intended way to play the game, won't work for some maps and would become tedious rather quickly without taking breaks, but I've managed to get 50 units of food from one map by employing this strategy, more than I've seen anyone have at any one time in any of the runs I've watched.

General performance was a bit spotty, usually can run MSAAx2 just fine but am going without it for now. Will be interesting to see when DX12 is properly supported if it makes much difference. Load times though seemed very good to me, which is just as well because the end of the first mission would have broken me completely otherwise. Having to hit spacebar every time is annoying though.

^ Good to know. I have no problem with the how the background setting was established in Dishonored. But when it was time to fill the setting with actual characters, the game stumbled. Corvo because of the backwards-compromise of a silent protagonist who is nonetheless a fully established character. The Empress, who we probably should have seen a bit more of at the start of the game - perhaps as a prologue where she sends you to do the actual mission you're implied to have just returned from. The Outsider because, well, I can't explain why this boring guy with a Bieber haircut is the personification of chaos and how anyone in the dev team thought that was the way to go. The rest of the cast - allies and adversaries both - are fairly perfunctory, but if the main cast had been done better then it would have gone some way to covering the deficiencies. As it was, my reaction to each was a resounding meh. A shame, because the ambience, architecture and general art style hit the right spot.

I thought it was mechanically good, and as I've said elsewhere, I wish Deus Ex (and other stealth games) stole more mechanics from it. That said, good mechanics can only sustain me for so long, so I never finished the game. I had no desire to see where the story went, cared nothing for the characters, and the Outsider, supposedly a Loki-like trickster god, had about as much personality as XCOM Outsiders. The main reason the game petered out then was the degradation in level design: I thought the early levels had a good, open, sprawling-yet-connected feel to them and I liked just wandering around them. Later on they turned more and more into linear, single path corridors, presumably as deadlines approached (and we've heard a bit about Zenimax's approach to external studios). Anyway, the point is that yes, I'm interested in the sequel, and barring it being a complete disaster will pick it up and do a stealth run. As Emily. Then if I'm inclined to, I'll do a murderball run. Also as Emily, because Corvo is the second most boring man in the world, after the Outsider. The mask is basically his entire personality.

Thing about videogame directions is that you would have to trust whoever wrote the NPC's script to be sufficiently accurate and complete in their directions because it's the only set of directions you can get. In the real world if you fail to find the place, you can go back either to the same person to ask for clarification or ask someone else entirely. In a videogame they'd just regurgitate the same dialogue line they used the first time around. If the directions are confusing or outright wrong, as they were occasionally in Morrowind, you're reliant on an external guide or just dumb luck. (Besides, if every quest were to have comprehensive and detailed directions, then you'd probably end up with the majority of the recorded lines in the game being exactly that and not, y'know, plot and characterisation) Maybe it's heresy in "old-school gamer" circles (and I played the same games as they did), but I have no problem whatsoever with quest markers. You can justify it by imagining Geralt pulling out his map and the questgiver marking the exact spot, or maybe you can even imagine more implied dialogue with one or more NPCs helping in nailing down that exact location, whatever. All I can say is that amongst all that, I'm very much comfortable calling the game one of the best of all time, and in the conversation for GOAT.

Started a game of CK2 as a single county count in East Francia. A number of years later made Duke of Austria for no reason. A couple of decades later elected Holy Roman Emperor for no reason. End of game. One of those weird things where things line up to end in a nonsensical outcome. In the just-under-30 years gametime I had, I started no wars, did not expand past my single county, was nowhere near Austria to justify being made Duke, and had no specific allies to further my non-existent political goals.

Do your standard rulers you use at school not have 1-30cm on one edge and 1-12in on the other? Measuring cups with mL on one side and fl oz on the other? Nutritional labels on food with both kJ and calories?

Yeah, I really burned out on the hacking minigame in HR, and now it's functionally the same, but presented even worse with less clarity and usability. This minigame in general is one of those things that look okay on paper as a designer, until you realise the player is going to be faced with hundreds of repetitions of the exact same thing. Minigames aren't going away anytime soon, but the best implementations typically take about half the time, and usually there's a second completely different minigame to break it up a little. Incidentally I also think the animations in the game have somehow gotten even twitchier and generally stilted, which is quite the accomplishment given how hopped up on caffeine everyone in the previous game looked. Hmm. And because complaints come in threes, why is Jensen's toilet seat a square? Is it a special design for augmented butts?

I liked the tutorial level right up until the sandstorm. At that point, I just panicked because I didn't have a clue where anyone was or what I was supposed to do. Only way I figured out how to keep Singh alive was by shooting him myself with the non-lethal dart so the enemies would think he's already dead. The sandstorm bugged me because it seemed like I was the only one blinded by it. I couldn't see jack all, but my enemies saw me (and Singh) like it was a bright and sunny day out. I probably reloaded a couple dozen times, and the first third of those it was probably because I had no idea what I was expected to do. I'll admit I didn't even know you were supposed to jump off the cliff to start the engagement, again one weakness of the poorly-explained augment suite you start off with. In the end I just made a few exploratory rushes on the helicopter to figure out where the non-obvious objective point was, then used the invisibility augment to magically walk over to said point and immediately end the mission. Because I guess all the bad guys magically realise their craft is no longer flyable and give up fighting the moment that happens (did Jensen eat the battery or something?). On reflection, the process of just standing around trying to figure out what's happening reveals another dumb thing: the VIP you're meant to rescue spends the whole time standing out in the open exchanging gunfire while being outnumbered a dozen to one, even before the sandstorm starts. If not for the metagamer in me knowing there'll inevitably be a reward for saving him, I'd say he's too dumb to live. P.S. To compare the stealth gameplay with Dishonored again, it boggles the mind that there's still no option to carry bodies over your shoulder, and allowing you to chain a silent takedown into it, when it's bloody obvious Jensen should easily be capable of that. This addition alone would be huge improvement on how the stealth gameplay feels.

Yeah, i got through the subsequent cutscene (and boy does this game not do subtlety), and saw that. Hopefully this'll be the start of my positive experiences with the game, because as in HR, my least favourite parts of the game were the long, self-contained story missions. And if the game continues to sink, well, at least the GOTY patch for The Witcher 3 is out. That, and I'm weighing up WoW Legion, which seems to have a positive reception so far despite my dislike of the direction they're taking the game storywise (particularly the utter laziness of bringing back big-name dead villains).