Humanoid

And some of the gameplay DLC is eminently skippable too. Just about everyone skips Sunset Invasion, the fantasy scenario of an Aztec invasion of Europe. I personally disable Jade Dragon too because despite what the name suggests, it doesn't really add China, but only a silly and unbalanced off-map abstraction of it. Besides that, Rajas of India is very niche, and Horse Lords only marginally less so, get them only if you plan to play in those regions. Of the DLCs that add new bookmarks to the game, Charlemagne adds a new one a century earlier (769) than the Old Gods (867), but it's a very unbalanced game state that I recommend against playing. Note by default the game used to start no earlier than 1066 which made Old Gods the most popular DLC to extend gameplay, but just about the last thing added to the game (alongside Holy Fury) was a new bookmark of 936 which is one of the most interesting starts and in my mind is the better choice.

Yeah, Fail tends to imply a sort of graceful termination, like "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that". Abort just immediately drops all those plates you're carrying and damn the consequences.

Questions and memes are great and all, but have you heard Hocus Pocus by Focus?

Didn't even know there was colony building. But I completely ignored it in FO4, and I will do so again.

I only got 26 hours out of Fallout 4, of which none of them qualified as awesome. Hopefully Starfield clears that low bar, but if it doesn't, well, I'll have paid nothing for it specifically.

Huh, the impression I got from the trailer is that it was a continuation of the main game as you try to find a cure. I suppose it'd be interesting to try male V, but only if I also change my playstyle and forcibly make myself interact with the game's combat systems, rather than bypassing them all with stealth.

All I wanted is more main game, and it sounds like more main game is what we're getting. Pleased with that outcome, especially with it being a narrative sequel, rather than one of those mid-game DLCs where you're expected to load back a save from before the point of no return. Those are a pet peeve of mine as not only is it jarring to have to rewind time, it also ensures that the new content is ultimately pointless, a side-story with zero impact on the greater game world.

I'm a bit concerned about the followers as their existence tends to run counter to my preferred sneaky-sneaky playstyle. Rest of it seems fine to me, with the caveat that I never finished either PoE game.

To use a "dumb" multi-M.2 adapter like that, I believe you need a motherboard that supports PCIe bifurication, and the end result depends on how the motherboard splits the lanes, e.g. 8/8, 8/4/4, or 4/4/4/4. I believe this is how a card like the Asus Hyper M.2 works. If your motherboard doesn't support bifurication, then you would need a card that has the smarts included, and those things will cost many hundreds of dollars.

And you had to pay $19.95 for the privilege!

Wonder if AMD are regretting letting Sapphire release that oddball 10GB 6700 non-XT, because geez that card fills a really wide sweet spot right now. And for such a limited-release product, availability for it has been great.

The jankiness probably helped me. I can't play Valve/Source games because they give me motion sickness, but Bloodlines was generally fine. If they had launched with the finished, polished version of the Source engine, who knows if that would still be the case. I'm not even someone generally susceptible to motion sickness, I can't think of any other game that triggers it for me. Then again I don't play a lot of first-person games so the sample size isn't huge. It occurs to me that perhaps one big reason I liked the game is that there was no real faffing around with gear. A gun's a gun, a bat's a bat, and you get exactly one armour upgrade per chapter that's a linear upgrade over the previous set. Looting is the bane of roleplaying.

It's a mix of two things mostly. First and most common is simply substituting dialogue with wackier sounding alternatives, where the NPC then comments on before proceeding with their usual response. So it's just flavour dialogue and functionally identical to a standard run. It's like games where if you play a low-INT character, the NPC will pretend to be exasperated by your stupidity but give you the same quest in the end. The other is bits of foreshadowing, which yes, will go over your head if it's the first playthrough, but also doesn't really harm the experience in my view. I wouldn't really count the writers basically just winking and saying "see what we did there?" as content I'm not counting uses of the Dementation usage in dialogue as it's more just a speech check thing, same as if you had Domination on a Ventrue or whatever.

Even as someone who barely remembers the first movie and didn't watch the sequels, Gollum with hair is incredibly uncanny valley.

The Malkavian cheerleader was my first playthrough, didn't feel like I missed out on anything but not playing another clan first. Played mostly stealth. Dialogue wasn't *that* obtuse for someone reasonably genre-savvy. I remember doing a partial run as some clan with Celerity and guns afterwards. Don't remember much about it other than being able to take down a boss by simply entering bullet time and emptying multiple pistol clips into them with one blood use. Quintessential vampire combat that. Nothing wrong with the run but ultimately after Downtown I saw no reason to complete the game a second time.

Borderlands would be good if it had no loot management.

Now there's a new plan to protect myself from burglars.

I mean, it falls outside the topic of gaming opinions, but will be unpopular nonetheless, but cats should certainly be exterminated completely in Australia.

I can understand it in certain circumstances as I'm not sure it'd be practical for, say, something like Minecraft to look like Skyrim. But if it's just done as nostalgia-bait then eh, it's not a dealbreaker but probably means the game will turn out worse than it could have been. It's just voluntarily making your game less readable. Speaking of making your game less readable, I'm feeling the same about the much-praised Persona 5 UI. Weird pulsing off-angle text is somehow praiseworthy? Naaaaah, it's a crime against usability. As is its insistence on not letting you use the analogue stick to navigate menus. Awful. A tangential peeve: text that's slowly printed across the page, forcing you to click to have it display in full, or even worse, just forcing you to wait it out.

The remarkable thing about TA is that it genuinely felt like it was two generations ahead of its contemporaries (as opposed to TA Kingdoms which required hardware two generations beyond what was available at that point in time). Mechanically everything just felt so unified, where other RTSes felt like they consisted of a bunch of different systems bolted together haphazardly. Notably, the three vectors of land, sea and air existed in the same virtual space, where other games would have each of them essentially behave as if they existed in a parallel universe, where the only possible interaction between them was "shoot". This unity is reflected in individual unit interactions. When a unit was being transported, the unit as a 3D object was moved within the bounds of the game physics, whereas any other game would just instantaneously disappear the unit in the blink of an eye, and have it magically rematerialise later when you unload - recall the meme of ten War Elephants entering a Tardis-like transport ship barely the size of one elephant. A simpler example would be "corpses" existing actual obstacles instead of just being mechanically irrelevant set decoration. Missed projectiles continue to exist and their impact simulated instead of just cosmetically missing and ceasing to exist. The UI was ahead of its time too. The command queue in particular was so elegant, in an age where something like Age of Empires could barely manage a functioning movement waypoint system. You could automate repairs either by setting travelling repairmen or setting up repair facilities, etc. Despite all that praise though, the game never fit my gaming style. I don't do competitive multiplayer, and the AI was a complete embarrassment. It literally consisted of: step 1, build random unit; then step 2, send unit towards nearest valid target, as the crow flies. Anyone who's ever attempted to play a water map will easily observe the result of this "logic" as units just swarm onto the beach as if it were spring break. That made the game completely unsuitable for just sitting down a playing a casual skirmish against AI, or any sort of co-op. By contrast, I've played hundreds of hours of AoE2 within the past few years simply because it does function extremely well in that gameplay mode. AI scripting by modders kept the game alive during the decade of abandonment by Microsoft, and when support resumed with the arrival of the remasters, those modders were employed by the developers to implement the new official and extremely good AI. Right now if I have an hour or so to burn and nothing else I particularly want to play, I'll fire up a simple skirmish like this and it remains a fresh experience 25 years on.

Depends how much of a purist you are in terms of looking up external resources. It may be annoyingly difficult if you try to learn everything organically through experience because for stuff like bosses, you can't just practice them over and over: it will be a few hours between attempts because getting to the boss is not trivial. However if you're willing and able do your homework and look up the fight beforehand, on the wiki or YouTube or whatever, then you have a massive leg up and could probably go in with better-than-even odds.

My one memory of Breath of the Wild is playing for 15 minutes, accidentally hitting the button that throws away your weapon, and not being able to figure out how to fix that. Figured I'd start a new game instead the next time I launched it. Six years later and that hasn't happened yet...

I have a deep hatred of the concept of "S tier". S is the 19th letter in the English alphabet, not the 0th. You start with 'A'. If you need to retrospectively add something ahead of it, make it 'A+'. There, simple. Not strictly a gaming thing I know, but probably the most common association.

I'd never heard of that Lamplight game (but am aware of the notorious Fallout 3 area). Looking at the thumbnail though, boy that's some collection of angry faces.

I've been relatively blessed, haven't had a motherboard die on me since an MSI board for an old Athlon 1800+ around 20 years ago, and even then it was for the family PC and not my personal one (which was on a Soltek motherboard of all brands, was excellent). I have used all of the big four vendors over the past decade and all have been fine. Was careful to get the P55A board revision for my i5-750 since the initial launch had dodgy retention pressure which resulted in - wait for it - exploding sockets. What's old is new again, eh? Even outside of motherboards I've been pretty lucky with outright failures. The scoreboard is 1-1 for video cards, with a dead Radeon 9800 Pro and a dead GeForce 7900 GT, but admittedly this doesn't count cooler fans conking out. One dead SSD out of a dozen or so, and perhaps most shockingly, the last dead HDD I recall is a 2GB Fujitsu from the late 90s. EDIT: The quirks of each motherboard vendor can be a little frustrating, yes. Asus invented Flashback for example but have been oddly reluctant to add it to many boards, in order to create some artificial market segmentation. MSI do something similar. Gigabyte on their part deserve some praise for putting it on basically their entire product stack, down to their sub-$100 entry level boards with A/H-series chipsets. Meanwhile Asrock didn't implement it at all for a long time.