Humanoid

Sounds good to me. You make up for Mr Mag's contribution, and I'll make up for Malekith's.

I don't get it, isn't Star Wars all about swords and magic?

At the start of the weekend I was thinking that if the new WoW expansion turned out to be any good, I might pop in and give it a go for a while, hang out a bit and mess around with people I haven't played with for two-and-a-half years. But well, obviously the launch didn't go quite so well - indeed it's giving AC5 a run for its money. So scratch that idea. Instead I'm giving The Sims 4 another earnest go. I got it a couple weeks ago, but it wasn't doing anything for me. Well, it's working a bit better now. The problem was that in trying to play it like I did the previous game, I ran headfirst into TS4's biggest weakness: single-sim households. Now I've always played the Sims games in two distinct ways: a) singleton sims which I play actively, taking part in their daily management in a pseudo-RPG setup; and b) multi-sim households where I largely leave the inhabitants to their own devices: a virtual ant-farm if you will, or a (very) light Dwarf Fortress-style arrangement. The former gameplay style doesn't work at all in the new game as it stands, the new short-term mood system and the stripped-down wishes functionality that is linked to it has no synergy whatsoever with the life of a lone sim. You only have a maximum of three wishes, you can't 'promise' (i.e. save) them, and can't cancel them to generate new ones. One wish slot is tied directly to your current mood and therefore comes and goes as quickly as your mood swings - sometimes you get less than half an hour to act on them. The result of this is that very often there are literally no practical short-term goals to pursue, kind of like having an RPG with no quests. Now that I'm experimenting with the latter gameplay style, I'm beginning to see the strengths of the new system. With other Sims almost always around, wishes that would otherwise go ignored (the social ones, which is the majority of them) become relevant, and interactions between Sims are a lot more dynamic and interesting to play than any previous title. Unfortunately this is currently hampered by the limited AI functionality that makes large households unwieldy; for example, the 'claim bed' (or any other item ownership) functionality does not currently exist, so Sims will sleep in whatever bed they wish, often leaving another Sim without anywhere to sleep because of relationship statuses. That at least, unlike the single-sim issue, is a weakness that can be patched, so I look forward to usability improvements over the coming months. For the moment, I reckon to get the best out of the game, two to four bedroom households is pretty much the usable range.

Though for some of the newer ones, your battery would run flat before the intro cutscenes can even finish.

XCOM: Enemy Within just hit both Android and iOS today.

Well the other 50% was about killing Darkspawn in tunnels.

Wow, someone here really likes video games... So is there a no pants mod for DA:I yet?

The first Mario Kart 8 DLC pack is now active, so tried each of the new tracks (eight of them) in easy mode. I'd not played the game for some months now, so I don't have a good gauge of relative difficulty, but in terms of production value, they're by every measure as good as the original tracks. There are a few extra characters and vehicles but I don't really concern myself with them.

Well, the fact that they sent out review copies at all, unlike The Sims 4, is a good sign, right? Right?

Shouldn't you be, er, requesting this on the forums of whoever developed DS1+2 then?

Couple of things come to mind: 1) I feel I need a definitive player character. There may or may not be party members, but I have difficulty RPing if there's more than one character of my own creation in the game. I struggle to get into the spirit of Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin for example, even though mechanically I'm quite happy with them. Also most 'old school' RPGs from the 80s and 90s suffer this problem - your Gold Box games, Might and Magics, etc. 2) I don't really care all that much about the absolute quality of the story/writing, but I do absolutely care that it respects player agency. Even in a completely linear game, this manifests in being able to disguise the rails well - that is, if you're only going to have one path through, better bloody well make it the most obvious choice that a reasonable player character would take. For example, I feel both Dragon Age and Baldur's Gate 2 are mechanically quite boring, and yet I believe the latter is a very good game overall, and the former rather substandard - a position I'd never be able to justify on gameplay alone.

Little Big Adventure, a.k.a Twinsen's Adventure is free for 24 hours.

My biggest beef with Skyrim was the fact that there were dragons. These days I advise people to not activate the dragons until done fooling around with side content.

I actually typed up basically the same car analogy (with different brands, mind), but decided to not post it because car analogies.

Retailer-come-competitor though. So uh, probably betraying my lack of knowledge of the American retail sector, but it's like no longer selling Best Buy branded stuff at Wal-mart. Tortured analogy, I know, and I think largely unimportant. Pulling a game from Wal-mart will probably result in a number of lost sales, sure, but theoretically it may yet be better for the bottom line once the margins are taken into account. The same logic applies for digital sales, only that the gap is probably even easier to make up for. EDIT: Filter didn't like my spelling of come.

Obviously the best solution to avoid such disagreements is to have 10 charisma in real life.

Probably did their numbers and found that for any sufficiently high-profile title, not being on Steam has zero meaningful impact on sales and thus having it there does absolutely nothing except to enrich a competitor. Anything that reverses the modern gaming trend of Steam being an always-on piece of software, as pervasive as one's operating system or anti-virus (probably moreso than the latter even), on is fine by me.

This is the Witcherverse, so instead of Horse Armour they'll have Whore Armour. :D

There needs to be a Monty Hall gameshow type of setup where you open portals and there's either a dragon of a lounge suite behind the portal you choose.

It's true, those crotchety old atheists are sad because they shun the faith of Comic Sans.

As someone who enjoyed Skyrim but absolutely loathed Oblivion, that'd put me in a bit of a pickle.

Sportsmanship! More fighting games need to have cordial handshakes at the conclusion of gruelling fights like that.

What do you get when you mix Unrest with Alpha Protocol? The new project by the developers of Unrest, of course. It's a liiittle bit more traditional RPG than its predecessor, mainly in that you only play a single character this time around, and you have a few of your own character traits. Fundamentally though, it's built on the same engine and you interact with the denizens of the world in the same way.

Yep, I won't even build a PC without an SSD these days no matter how low-end. A little unfortunate thing though is that the V300 is the subject of a notorious bait and switch - Kingston changed the NAND chips on it to a slower model without telling anyone in the middle of the product's lifecycle. It still works fine, but the new V300 is a strictly inferior product to the V300 when it first launched. On the other hand, I'd take size over speed anyday if it came down to that.