Humanoid

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.

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.