Humanoid

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.

Tempted, but will wait until they enable multiplayer for it. Until then, would be interested in hearing if anyone has tried it in co-op on Steam. (Tangentially, am a little sad that Hades never turned up on GOG, and I've just bought it on Microsoft Store over the alternatives because of the Play Anywhere functionality)

Yeah, Taleworlds liked doing those "standalone expansion" things that used to be more common back in the day. I don't mind that at all really, if you've got a good functioning engine, may as well make the most of it by releasing new content with minimal technical improvement, instead of discarding it after one game. In this case it also makes more sense than a traditional expansion because I don't think there's much reason for most normal players to go back to the original Mount and Blade after Warband.

Released in 2010, I know time flies but still.

I remember Encased's stealth system being so janky it made me quit the game, hmm. For as much as Skyrim's "must have been the wind" AI sometimes pulls you out of a game, Encased's alert system had an approximately 10 minute real-time duration, so if you weren't save-scumming, detection meant hiding in a corner somewhere and then going to make yourself some tea or coffee. That and the weird 360-degree detection "cone" of NPCs...

Yes, but way back in 2020, so my experience is probably not particularly relevant to the current state of the game. Have to say it was a decent experience even back then, with the caveat that my most frequent thought about it was "I wish this was more like Divinity and less like faithful D&D". So no regrets, although there is the catch that I used a VPN to buy it for less that full local retail price. However with the game launching as little as four months time, I don't really see the point of jumping into it now. Surely it'd be better to play the game completely fresh on actual launch?

For my co-op run, we just let the dice fall where they may: used the randomly rolled stats they give you without once touching the re-roll button. The one difficulty hump we hit was early on and I suspect that was because we skipped a sidequest ( ) which I suspect meant we were one level short of what the coming encounter was balanced around.

It was a good game, but not a good enough game for me to bother looking into any other games in the series, past or future. Well, up until circa 2019 when I tried FF14. So I've played FF7, FF14, and am therefore due to play FF21 whenever that comes out. Perhaps that opinion was coloured by the PC port, especially as I played most of it with the software renderer - I only became aware of the Riva patch late in the piece when it was included on a PC magazine CD. (It also notoriously had all the keybinds mapped to the numpad by default, and rebinding them meant ...using the numpad to access the menu. Yeah that needed a patch too, though to be fair tenkeyless keyboards were a rarity back then) And yeah, I went from the pseudo-3D S3 Virge DX (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000) to the Riva 128 (Diamond Viper V330) to, I think, the TNT 2 Ultra (Diamond Viper V770). Third time's a charm. First one was just what came with the family PC, second one was my (stupid) choice but still my parents' money, third one was the first with "my" money - though it'd be a stretch to say I earned it: it would have been government student payments.

There was a patch that added nVidia Riva 128 support to the game, which made it perform marginally less horribly. Terrible video card though, it took some cynical shortcuts to improve its performance (so nVidia could claim it beats the Voodoo 1) most notably horrible greyscale dithering. My Civ2 wonder videos which suddenly looked like someone had flicked cigarette ash all over them. Performance cheating proved to be very on-brand for nVidia over the coming years, so I suppose it's no surprise in hindsight.

Finally got around to upgrading my 1TB WD SN750 to a 2TB Kingston KC3000. Partly it's for that PCI-E 4.0 goodness, but mostly it's because the 700GB partition I had set aside for Game Pass games had proven woefully inadequate. It wasn't an actual practical problem as I had plenty of space left over on my other SSDs for the overflow, but it was bothering me that I had Game Pass games installed on the volume labelled "Steam". So now the new drive is partitioned with around ~300GB for Windows and user data, and the balance for non-Steam, non-GOG games (as those each have their own drives). Unfortunately my laziness was my downfall here as I was too lazy to plug both drives into actual M.2 slots at the same time, instead choosing to clone the old drive to the new one via a USB caddy so I'd only have to do one switcheroo afterwards. 5-and-a-half-hours later it's finally done with the copy. Yeah... Not sure what I'm doing with the old drive. I could just wipe it clean and put it back in, but I don't currently need any extra SSD space on my desktop, since I already have in excess of 5TB of SSD space now. I could upgrade my laptop drive, but it's not a gaming laptop and so the 250GB SSD that it came with isn't really a problem. I could just put it into the USB caddy and effectively turn it into a portable SSD ...but I already have one twice as large.

I think I rage quit ME3 when the second dream sequence started. I will never return to that series. In retrospect my opinion of the game has worsened even more, not helped by the defenders who claim "only the ending is bad". No, the beginning is just as bad, as is the middle, and everything else. The Mass Effect series parallels the the Rambo movies quite neatly, come to think of it. The high concept vanishes pretty much immediately after the first title. That's being too kind to ME3 though. It doesn't just lose the original point, it twists back on itself and delivers the exact opposite message it originally attempted to convey. _____ As for the others, I don't recall much of KoTOR, no strong feelings about it either way. I suspect that's because it's wedged awkwardly between my fondness (at the time) for BG2 and my general dislike of Star Wars. Never played JE.

I never played the Gold Box games when they were new, but every time I've tried them in the decade since, I could never get over the dead feeling of the locations. Y'know, how you're in a starting city or whatever, and it looks just like a dungeon because it's literally just a maze of walls until you interact with a shop door. Obviously the tech isn't there to show actual NPCs milling around in the first-person navigation view, but the games just feel so dead when compared to something like Ultima where the world felt so alive, and where I could spend hours just wandering around town without a single fight.

Oh for the (literal) day of AV. Play a bit, have a full night's sleep, rejoin in the morning.

I'm the opposite, in that I want zero potential distractions. So not only do my keys emit zero light, I don't want any illumination at all from that direction, hence the taped-up numlock LED. The keycaps are therefore bog-standard PBT plastic (as opposed to cheap ABS plastic that goes shiny with wear), That, and I don't play horror games at all.