Humanoid

It's interesting to me how so many are happy to accept "sure, FIFA are totally corrupt" but aren't willing to see that just about every top level pro is also doped to the gills. Frankly, they'd have to be idiots not to do it given the rewards for doing so, and the complete absence of consequences. For those who have reached a high enough level of celebrity, there's not even the slightest fear of being caught, having complete immunity due to commercial and political interests. It's no surprise that every major scandal originates from an investigation from the outside which have no investment in sports, be it the police, the FBI, etc.

Thats how I felt about a lot of the Walking Dead. I would have thought the opposite with the Walking Dead, with people feeling they've made choices only to discover that after talking about the game with other people (or just replaying the game), it turns out they didn't do anything to change anything.

For a moment there you had me thinking that it was just my imagination that I already had a number of Telltale games on GOG. (It does mean I do already have all the Telltale games that matter though)

Instead of more storage, I'd have preferred flat out having less available stuff to loot. I guess it comes with the territory of open-world RPGs, but I don't find gameplay systems like that enjoyable at all. I guess I just don't see the point for mundane materials for example being something the player should ever be concerned with. Crafting a sword for example, it's just needless complexity for Geralt to have to go out and supply the iron, the leather, plain old wood: all stuff that'd be trivial for a smith to acquire. Instead why not just have one rare part you need to give the smith, and abstract the rest of it by saying that the smith's fee includes the cost of him providing the mundane stuff. Herbs are trivially common and you trip across them moving one minute in any direction, why bother counting quantities at this point? Rusty swords, wolf livers, etc, I don't think any of that stuff adds any gameplay value. Still very much enjoying the game, just wish there wasn't all the side stuff that seemingly is only there because it's some perceived requirement for a game to be described as "open-world".

There seems to be a good response to the following tweak to adjust gamepad movement sensitivity. Meanwhile I'm still in the starting area, having reloaded my save from when I inadvertently progressed the plot (which in itself feels pretty goofy), and after having to borderline exploit the game to kill a level 10 drowner at level 3, end up encountering dozens of level 3-4 drowners elsewhere. Weird, but not the main point I'm trying to make: drowners are super, super glitchy. I see a bunch of red dots in the water showing where they are, so I try to get them to come ashore, but they ignore me. I take some random potshots at them with the crossbow, but I'm not sure they can hit under the water. No good obviously, so as I make to leave, a drowner just swims to the shore ....and keeps going. Swimming in the air. So being totally outclassed, I prepare for a super cautious fight. Well, it just runs around in a circle of about 1m radius. I stand about 2 metres away and plink away at it with Igni (~100 damage/hit) and the crossbow (<20 damage/hit), It has several thousand hit points, but doesn't even try to approach me. I'd have won this fight by default in time, but then.... a Nilfgaardian soldier on horseback rides by. A very slow dance starts as they circle each other and swing for very low damage to each other about once every 15 seconds, and as their movement becomes increasingly irregular, end up moving the fight to a small settlement where the peasants all cower. Eventually the drowner dies, yay. No brain, nooooo. Well that was an incredibly stupid encounter. As for the monster density, eh, my opinion is somewhere in between. I think without the stupidly aggressive wolf trope which is in extreme effect, it'd be about right.

Well the savings aren't huge as such, but for non-overclockers I'd generally just go with the lowest-spec quad-core option, which is to say, the i5 4460. You do lose a few hundred MHz but in practice it won't realistically limit anything you do. Or take the middle ground and just get the non-K version of the 4690, which is simply a non-overclockable version. As for the board, it's even more marginal in terms of savings, for the most part a Z97 board is simply a H97 board which supports overclocking, but the price difference is probably in the order of $5-10.

The only real quibble is that the 'K' series CPU is made for overclocking, so not doing it kind of misses the point, as does having a Z series motherboard, so if anything it makes the motherboard overbudget. The PSU is fine, video card will draw ~200W, maybe peaking at 250W, CPU 100W at most. And yeah, transferring the old hard drive is trivial, though probably easier to do it after installing the OS on the SSD to prevent any confusion.

Humble Store is weird with CK2, they don't' seem to carry much in the way of individual DLC, just the all-on-one pack. Which I guess is sort of just getting the cosmetic DLC bundled in "free" with otherwise so-so pricing for the 'real' DLC.

The ones that have been out long enough to be on sale. ...except Sunset Invasion. No one likes Sunset Invasion.

Are you saying you're not a tool of the Illuminati?

I think in the Witcher 2 blocks by default only reduced damage, but after some upgrades could nullify it. Might be the same here? I haven't really looked at the skill trees.

Tried playing with a gamepad. Griffin slaughtered me over and over for about an hour. I can see how it should be better, but it's taking a good long while to get my head around the mappings, rolling instead of attacking, using a sign instead of blocking, ugh. Now I was underlevelled for the fight, having now learned I should have sidequested first, but a level wouldn't have helped me press the right buttons (or see the griffin's attack frames). Oh well, try again tomorrow.

If you hit the block button as the attack happens, you counter. I'm bad at timing it though, I find that if I click it when the enemy nameplate glows, it's too late. And I'm not sure if certain enemies like the griffin are counterable.

An indirect benefit of rebadging old cards under new names, the HD7950 is still effectively a current card. Meanwhile Kepler is all but abandoned as it's no longer sold.

I would like to hire some tugboats to drag Australia to the Atlantic Ocean.

"Finally, the last thing I’ll say to ... the cynics and the sceptics: I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles." - Lance Armstrong, 2005

It's the most common complaint about the console versions at the moment, and no way of changing it as of yet. Apparently a fairly hefty patch is due next week, which hopefully adds an option to do so.

A fake-class based system like D:OS works for me, where classes are nothing but templates (and starter gear) for a classless system behind the scenes. That said, I don't want another party-based game. Sci-fi or no, I want a solo experience next.

All yours. EDIT: Aside from Sengoku, CK2 and EU4, the rest of the contents of the bundle up for grabs.

I really want that letter, but I'd need to go pirate something first.

Only able to spend an hour and a bit on it so far, gaining just the one level. Only real negative I'm finding so far is that the movement can be a bit janky when you stop-start a lot, and end up spending most of the time in accelerate-decelerate animation cycles which look and feel awkward. It's one of those things where the pursuit of realism can get in the way of how players tend to actually move in games. Contrast to Skyrim, say, where you immediately snap into a running animation the moment you hit a movement key, which looks primitive but does feel a lot more responsive as a result (despite its blatant disregard of physics). Partly as a result, getting into the right position to examine or loot objects can be a bit annoying. As for bugs, just a couple minor ones with a pair of auto-opening doors freaking out when I barged through them, and one time where I apparently clipped into the geometry of a table and got shunted to the other side of it. The writing, no complaints. and having continuity of character means the dialogue and the choices I make all come off pretty naturally. At least, I haven't made a dialogue choice yet that would make Geralt sound like an idiot (or which would generally feel like the game is in DM exposition mode). I'm finding myself deliberately *not* exhausting dialogue options with every NPC whenever I feel it's more in character to not talk about a certain thing, and that's usually a good sign because it means I'm treating the NPCs as characters, not bulletin boards. I even feel bad for bowling over peasants while riding past them. Controls, too early to say. I do really like the addition of the dodge/sidestep move, which both plays and feels a lot better than the constant combat rolling of the previous game. It's a bit awkward hitting the left alt key to perform it though, and the default binding for heavy attack (shift-LMB?) was such that I'd not bother even trying to hit it. Next play session I'll try a gamepad and see how it feels in comparison.

I think my Witcher 2 saves are archived on an old disconnected drive somewhere, spent entirely too long looking for them. Kinda silly anyway because even if I did find them, I'd not know which save was what. Hopefully the save simulation thing is a good substitute. As for performance, only getting mid-30s on a HD7950 at 2560x1440. (other specs: i5 750 @ 3.3GHz, 8GB RAM). It'll have to do, the low preset gave me mid-40s but the jaggies bothered me too much. Hopefully drive optimisation helps a little over the coming days and weeks. Plus I should overclock the GPU, now being more or less the start of winter helps.

Wouldn't mind it, but not keen on aliens. Primitive life forms are okay, but not a fan of that old cliche of encountering curiously humanoid aliens with remarkably similar technological progression to our own. That's not even science-fantasy, it's just plain old fantasy.

I've never played any Bard's Tale game and am barely even aware of them, but eh, will back on the strength of Wasteland 2 ....even if I haven't gotten around to playing it either.

Now there's an idea for a game, Mocap Guy Simulator. It'd be sort of a mashup of QWOP with Goat Simulator, where you control individual limbs and do stunts to get high scores. EDIT: Got my copy of the game just now, standard edition physical copy for PC. On the back of the manual there's a key with the note "Enter this code while launching the game to access extra features", which doesn't sound like much, but it's actually just a straight redemption of a GOG copy of the game. Pleased with that.