Humanoid

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.

Trying to play the Crusader Kings 2 tutorial. I'd heard it has issues, but by god, it's barely functional. I get the feeling I'd have better luck reading or watching a gameplay video than trying to make heads or tails of this mess.

I'd be curious what a collaborative Obsidian forums top-100 list, but I suspect I'd have no fewer issues with it.

A remastering of PS:T would involve throwing away all the game assets except the dialogue trees and coding everything else from scratch.

I imagine it just created a 500GB partition on your 1TB drive. Use the Disk Management tool in Windows ("Create and format hard disk partitions") to extend it.

Strictly talking the title in this context, but then I'm too young to have enjoyed the Gold Box games in the time they were released. I've since gone back to try a few though, and they did absolutely nothing for me. Not that it's any surprise, "old school" isn't a positive term for me, and hack and slash doesn't equate to RPG. I'll take the heresy even further. In the DOS era, only two good RPGs existed. Ultima, and Darklands.

I didn't like that it had a skull on the front of the box, skulls are scary. I'm only partially jesting, I don't actually know if I would have bought it if it had a more appealing box art, but as it stands I didn't get around to it until years later where it was no longer relevant except as a historical curio. Baldur's Gate is a perfectly servicable title in the context of prior meaningless or long-winded D&D game titles though. At least it's not as forgettable as say, Curse of the Azure Bonds.

The development of IWD2 is the reason I initially registered on the BIS forums, so I have history with that. It might seem strange then that IWD1 is the only IE game I've never played, not even for a minute. To be fair though, I started with BG2 and IWD2 was simply the next title in the 'series'. As for the other PS:T, by that stage, was actually pretty hard to find in stores, it might have taken a year or so to finally stumble upon a beaten-up copy at a K-Mart or Target somewhere - might have contributed to my never having finished it. BG1 I probably tried last, and by the time I did it had aged so badly that I didn't enjoy it at all.

If after 300 hours I'm not comfortable with it, then I probably should quit being a gamer. In all seriousness, Base Defense in the unmodded game was challenging and somewhat random too, but the way it was structured in the game meant you could somewhat prepare for it, as it wouldn't trigger until you completed certain events. The other thing is the extended roster of the mod, compared to vanilla where you had a definitive A-Team. Where you only have a squad of about 8 people (which was probably 6 + 2 spares anyway), distributed amongst only 5 classes, the game arbitrarily picking the first 6 of them in the list is no big deal - indeed there's a high probability it picked your most effective combination. When you have a roster of 40+, distributed amongst 8 (or indeed possibly 16) classes, picking the top 6 of that list is going to be inherently unbalanced.

The solution is to give everyone a robot slave. So you'd sort of be employed, except that you've subcontracted your job out to your personal robot.

Does it have romance XP?

My Long War game came to a sudden end, due to an unexpected base defense. I'm fairly confident that it was an unwinnable mission in my state, but that's why this is in beta I guess. Apparently the problem here is that all the variables are baked into vanilla code and the modders have not been able to change any aspect of the number of enemies, what type they are, how your own people are selected, or anything else meaningful. The difficulty of the mission is such that it can swing wildly from being comparatively trivial to literally impossible, and reloading a save from prior to the mission may generate a completely different outcome. While I do have a backup save (I play Ironman but due to LW bugs back up a save at the start of every month), it wouldn't feel right to use it, so I'm just going to take a break until the next beta, maybe some wild experimentation for the time being. For the record, I think the count was 6 Mechtoids, 4 Sectoid Commanders, 2 Berserkers and a Sectopod bum-rushing me in the space of two turns. With my own squad being automatically assigned as 3 Snipers, 2 Rocketeers who had long since run out of rockets, and a Scout, I had no chance, though I like to think I put up a decent fight taking down about 25 aliens before the bitter end. For what it's worth, it's not actually a hard game over, you lose a bunch of cash and other resources, your scientists and engineers are decimated, but the game technically continues - but it resulted in me being more than $900 in the red, so it is an effective game over for a campaign already on a knife edge. Still, I guess the disappointing aspect here is that, knowing the inherent technical issues around the mission scripting, the devs have somehow seen fit to nonetheless implement potential repeat base defenses in a given campaign, because that's how it was in the original UFO:EU/X-COM. Conceptually it's fair enough, but logically I'd say shelving the concept until it can be figured out internally would be the sensible option. Granted, issues like this are expected in a beta, and they do strongly recommend against playing Ironman, so I'll cop it on the chin. If it goes to release in this state though, then that'd be obviously unacceptable arrogance.

Not that I necessarily wanted this to happen, but finally, a Queen of my own. I'd posted a picture of someone else's Chryssalid Queen before ....but I like to think mine is somewhat larger.

I don't really mind in what absurd and insane direction they take the story, but I wish they'd go back to basics a bit with the gameplay. I'd like to be able to, y'know, see things happening sometimes instead of being a supersonic dervish of unrecognisable motion blur.

Edit timer's out but I guess I shouldn't leave anyone hanging. Anyone who knows this map pretty much knows I'm at the bottom edge of it, so running wasn't viable unless I just extracted immediately. But death or glory and all that, so I decided to go for it. No chance in hell of killing the elite in addition to the berserkers, so I dashed my medic (selected in the screenshot, with a crappy laser SMG which might have done 2-3 damage to one of those things) to behind the door of that white car on the left, flanking the elite but being unable to be flanked in return, with the hope of scaring him away on his turn instead of having him shoot and almost certainly one-shot one of my exposed troops. And boy, were there exposed troops. Rocketeer and Sniper in particular I couldn't afford to move, because the loss of shots or accuracy would have killed me. So the strategy was stand and deliver: a Chem Grenade to lower their damage resistance, parked the Assault at the front right corner of the van, hit all the berserkers with a Shredder. Three Close Combat Specialist free shots with a Pulse Shotgun chewed up the HP like nothing else, and the Assault followed up with two pistol shots, courtesy Close Encounters, to finish two of them off. Unfortunately one survived, but fortunately, of all people he chose to punch my scout, who I customarily stack with extra survivability items (Reinforced Armor for +1HP and +1DR, and Alloy Plating for +2HP). The punch hit for 11, so 12 before the DR, which means that without wearing both those items, my scout would have been dead. Seeing all that, whilst also being flanked, the Elite booked it and ran straight back into the UFO. Later on a 20hp Thinman and 25hp Outsider turned up, but they were absolute reliefs after that initial mess.

So the very first turn of a landed Abductor UFO, this happens. To add insult to injury, them pathing behind the van means I barely get any overwatch fire on them. For added fun, this snow-covered town? Right in the middle of the Sahara desert, apparently.

Who's to say they didn't do their Ph.D in the field of witchcraft?

I guess removing Jack Keane balances out removing all the other stuff.

It's a shame CDPR games aren't more mod-friendly, I'd totally play as Geraldine of Rivia.