Humanoid

Playing CK2 until about right now, waging a slow conquest of England having earlier formed Wales (with my capital in Northumberland, y'know, oop in Newcastle), when suddenly the Byzantine Empire fell into my lap via inheritance - apparently my husband who earlier somehow fluked his way into being elected Emperor changed the law to Primogeniture late into his reign and thus saddled my heir with the lot. And it's a powerful Byzantine Empire to boot, having expanded both east and west. It's kind of put a hard stop on my playthrough, because I'd have liked to try to build an empire of my own instead of having it thrust on me. :| I probably should have done more to try to get one of my younger kids as the heir to Wales so I could have kept going normally, but yeah, hindsight.

All AC games eventually get to that point, the sub quests start to get a little tiresome. The moment you start feeling like that just focus on the main quest Apt enough that DX feels like the complete opposite of AC then. I loved doing the little things in DXHR while wandering around both the Detroit and Hengsha hubs. But the actual core missions were an absolute chore and burnt me out, so much so that I just quit the game once I knew the hubs were done with, Never played Missing Link either.

I can't say I enjoyed TA, but I really appreciated how gracefully it was put together. Other RTSes had token clunky mechanics dealing with stuff like patrols, repairs, and even simple waypoints. TA put it all seamlessly together: want to direct a move to a particular spot then seamlessly begin a patrol with an arbitrary number of nav points? Trivial in TA, and construction units would autorepair things along the route to boot. Meanwhile more recent games like AoE2 had a patrol system where units could only be directly to stupidly move from one point to another, and to avoid pathfinding problems, the devs cheated by disabling collision detection for units on patrol so they just clip right through each other whenever they turn around. And god forbid you wanted to repair something small like a siege unit, the pixel hunting and pathfinding made it barely worth the risk that your repairers would path obliviously to their deaths. On the other hand, TA might be on record for having the dumbest opponent AI ever programmed. It was revealed that the AI works like this: 1) build random item from list of items eligible to be built; then, 2) any units that happen to be built using said random process, if it has an attack capability, attack nearest eligible target, which is whatever is closest, period, because the AI ignores fog of war. So yeah, TA - not my cup of tea, but I can appreciate in the way it moved the genre forward in a way subsequent imitators failed to even match.

http://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/52308/grand-theft-auto-v-release-dates-and-exclusive-content Was that the level they decided to show off in the demo? Because it scared me off from actual game proper due to how insane it was. It'd probably have been better appreciated if they had another demo level before that to acclimatise the player to the game before throwing them in the deep end.

I think the issue for me, aside from the insane pace of the things, is autonomy. The gameplay design of that style of RTS deliberately strips as much autonomy as possible from your units in order to force you to micromanage as much as possible. If they thought they could get away with making you tie the shoelaces for every single unit you had on the field, they'd make you do that too. The attitude is that if your units had even the slightest hint of intelligence and common sense, that'd be "cheating". I'm their commander, not their bloody nanny. I play a little bit of AoE2, because my sister asks me to. At the very basic level I'm annoyed right away that to do scouting, I have to manually move my scout to exactly where I want, and have to remember to keep queuing up moves for it while I do all the other busywork. Why can't I just give it an order to go "scout the fog"? I can do it well enough in Civilization, even if it's suboptimal. Give me the choice. And don't get me started on how any resources carried by a villager instantly vanishes into thin air the moment you (mis)click them onto a different resource. My preference in games is completely the opposite. When I play the Sims, I set maximum autonomy and let my Sims do whatever they wish, intervening only in situations where a required action such as repairing a broken appliance isn't supported by the AI.

Maybe I'm embittered by the late 90s wave of C&C clones, but yeah, beyond the surface, what I mean is that I have no respect whatsoever for that action oriented, buiid-a-base then rush-your-enemies type gameplay. I mean, that skill at that type of game is measured by "actions per minute" is a fair clue that something's gone drastically wrong with the 'strategy' aspect of the games. Slower paced and more cerebral type RTSes I can respect, though I don't really play them. The Close Combats and the Gettysburg's, and I imagine how the likes of Homeworld and Total War play (never tried those). TN: Maybe not so much mainstream now, I guess my disregard for it is such that I haven't really noticed the genre shrinking to mostly just Starcraft, but still Starcraft is one of those games I reserve no fondness for and is emblematic of the RTS design issue. One of the most, if not singularly the most, overrated games of all time.

Save files normally get sent to your Documents folder, not the Steam install directory, so no. To get rid of the saves automatically going onto your SSD, you can change where your Documents folder lives. It's a Windows thing, not a Steam thing (just go to the Properties for the Documents folder), but it also means moving your other files that you might want to retain fast access to, so it's not a perfect solution. An alternative is, because most games don't let you customise save directory (bloody hell, we could do this in the 80s), is to use symlinks/junction points to 'trick' the games into saving onto your hard drive: essentially you leave a 'shortcut' in your Documents folder that actually points to a location on your HDD. (Think of a symbolic link as a "super" shortcut) P.S. I think Steam does save screenshots to the Steam install directory by default though, might be worth looking if you take a lot of them.

1: RTS is the worst mainstream videogame genre.

Haha, well I went with it anyway for a while, but pretty rapidly ran out of motivation since there was little else obvious once you'd made a decent house and a self-sustaining farm. I guess building for its own sake has never been a particular ambition of mine, so it was all "that's it then?" I like Lego, but give me a bucket full of random assorted Lego pieces and I likely won't do anything with them.

News of the latest poll results have reached Norway, where preparations anticipating Scotland's imminent independence have moved into full swing.

Yeah, but if you're digging and hear some noises, the game's audio isn't really such that you can really place where they are. Do I keep digging forwards, or do I go around the side? So I mostly stayed close to home where I know everything had been secured. I'd make the worst explorer.

I'm a bit of a chicken in general, something like Bloodlines is probably my limit, but then it's always been a bit odd to me that it could be considered a horror game: I don't consider it one when the player is the one playing the monster. Minecraft, I'm mainly unnerved by the possibility that for any given block that I dig through, there might be a dozen spiders behind it out for my blood. I'm very, very vulnerable to jump scares. The eel in Mario 64 still haunts me to this day.

Minecraft is too scary for me.

I didn't care about this whole independence issue before, but knowing this, I'm now 100% for Scottish independence. Excuse me while I go browse Amazon UK for all the stuff.

This Batmobile edition is better anyway:

My first CK2 game that I've played for more than one generation. Pretty uneventful for the most part, all the major powers are intact, and indeed have expanded, and I as a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire. I had hit the random button to select my ruler until I got the first 'regular' ruler (Catholic, Europe, Count/Duke) since this was a learn-to-play playthrough. 300 years of relatively peaceful vassalage, only one major war to usurp the Duchy I was part of, aside from that I mainly picked off small independents at the edges of the Empire, no further wars within the HRE itself permitted because of Crown Authority. In hindsight I guess that's why everyone recommended I pick an independent ruler. So I decided to spice it up a bit and rebelled for independence funded by my 10000 gold, with a pitiful army but tens of thousands strong mercenary bands. I won that war, with the aid of a helpful concurrent rebellion, but I have no idea just how doomed I am with a smattering of holdings across Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, France, Scotland, and Ireland. The former two form my power base, the others I'd guess would be extremely vulnerable now without the protection of the Empire.

Maybe an exploitation take on Kung Fu. Something like Twin Dragon Encounters.

Oh absolutely, the Sims 3 runs like a crippled slug even on a dream machine, no upgrade, whether CPU, GPU or SSD even does anything meaningful to its performance. It was like that from the very beginning though, before any of the expansion pack bloat. A case of the programmers falling way behind the designers I guess. I still like it though, and prefer it more or less unconditionally to its predecessors. So I'm on that side of the Great Sims Schism I guess. I imagine my sister who's a Sims 2 die-hard would take far less issue with TS4's omissions.

Wikipedia does state it was devised on April Fools Day, 2011, so close enough. This is the 'official' English release I guess.

My dislike of KoTOR is mostly because it's Star Wars, but also due to the awkward non-combat skills. I mean computer spikes? What?

I tried the character creation (which is available as a demo) and it is pretty robust and fun to mess around with. It is one area of the game that's largely being praised anyway, so hey. Few quirks to get used to - mainly where to click on the face to adjust a particular facial feature but happy happy happy that slider hell is gone.

It wasn't until I needed to look up the top console games for platforms I knew very little about that I really understand why Metacritic is the big thing that it is. A few years back I got a 360 for non-gaming purposes, so I thought why not get a few games for it? Unlike PC games, there's not much discussion of console games on this forum, so the only obvious places I could look were places like IGN and Gamespot for questionable "best X games for 360" articles, or just look up Metacritic. Likewise when I wanted to buy a 3DS game as a gift for some family members. As for the Sims, the character height thing sucks, yeah, but it's only slightly less sucky than previous titles in this regard I guess. Having 100% of teens be 100% of the height of 100% of the adults isn't meaningfully less immersive than 100% of teens having 90% of the height of 100% of the adults. But the lot and foundation design is a lot more disappointing because it actually is a meaningful regression of a half-solved problem (joining parts of a house with a foundation to parts without them was possible only with cheat mode enabled in TS3, and the method to do it was exceedingly awkward, but it worked well enough once accomplished). It's a shame that over the course of 15 years or so, 3D games have yet to crack an elegant way to handle dynamic character height. No game I know of has adjustable actor height but also allows for reasonable animation for interaction between characters, it's very much an either-or situation. Or it can be extra suck like say, Skyrim, where you have neither customisable height nor any complex animations that justify the static height, making it extra-odd that there's a fixed height modifier depending on race.

I've enjoyed all the Sims games so far, but am dodging this for now, so yeah. Bunch of red flags about missing features, and while a lot of it is to be expected, a fair few of them spell out "technical issues" rather than "cut feature". It's one thing to nickel-and-dime on relatively simple stuff for future expansions, it's another to have limitations like everyone being the same height, foundations being all-or-nothing, plots having to be completely flat: it screams that there's something fundamentally wrong with the game engine and that it's not something that will ever be added. P.S. The Sims 3 was in a Humble Bundle not so long ago, so I wouldn't say it's costly.

Your feeling is not so wrong I got past some of the issues earlier, one telling me to split my army because it was too big to fit on the boats (it wasn't), then one where it told me to declare war, but finding I couldn't because during the previous part of the tutorial my cash balance went into the negative - had to restart that part of the tutorial. Now it's telling me that my wife is dead, and that I should click this button to arrange a new marriage. Except that she isn't quite dead. Not dead at all, actually. Bloody hell. EDIT: A quick Google reveals that part of the tutorial has been broken for well over a year. Geez.