Humanoid

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.

I've played the previous two Max Payne games, not extensively but for a few hours, but was fine - but yeah, never played the third because I didn't particularly enjoy them. I don't think it's any one special 'artistic' effect in particular, I have a suspicion that it's because of the way a particular engine handles player movement. In my case I suspect it's a Source Engine thing, with the caveat that the sample size is small. I don't even remember the context in which I played HL2 since I don't own the game, a demo or at a friend's house perhaps. VtM:Bloodlines gave me a bit of trouble, but nowhere near as bad, maybe the slow pacing and use of the third person camera at times helped. More recently it was just a YouTube video of HL2 that I couldn't keep watching after about 10 minutes. I don't think any other game has ever given me trouble.

Any number of reasons really, adding that I don't necessarily start, or even buy games, with the intention of finishing them. Game developers know this and tend to have half-baked endings anyway. Whether I finish a game or not tends to be a rolling target, any given play session with any given game might turn out to be the last, and I wouldn't necessarily know at the beginning of it. I've abandoned games where I'd estimate I'm 90% or more of the way through. I might get distracted by another game and leave it too long to get back into it. Maybe I get burned out by repetitive gameplay or relentlessly grim plotting. Or it could be sudden, a single narrative event or gameplay shift that totally loses me partway through. Perhaps I run into a showstopping bug. And don't discount that it could just a flat out bad game. P.S. Now that I think about it, if I count the games I've bought but haven't even started, 3.4% sounds even more accurate, heh. EDIT: In a sentence, I'd say the best explanation would be the inverse of the question. "Why should I finish this game?" It's up to each game to answer that question, and most of them fail it.

Not hard for me to believe, I fairly rarely finish mine. More than 3.4% granted, but less than 34%.

HL2 is one of the very few games that gives me motion sickness in its standard form - even watching a gameplay video of it sets me off. VR HL2 would just be cruel.

Multiplayer doesn't subtract from the game's budget, because if they didn't add multiplayer, their budget for the whole game would be zero, as mandated by EA policy.

For a short period, there were more women then men in my WoW guild, but that pretty swiftly regressed to the norm as we expanded from 10s raiding to 25s. This was back in 2007, mind. My take on it is that initially it was just a little group of friends and friends-of-friends where having women in that set meant the proportion was generally kept when those friends came in. But open recruitment the ratio was probably more 5:1, if not more, in favour of men.

Thought the Pikmin 3 DLC was terrible value, so good to see Nintendo have pulled their heads in a little. $12 for both packs together (who'd buy them individually for $8 each?) is more than reasonable - with the caveat that that's the US pricing, waiting to see what the markup is for other regions. Details up on the official MK8 site now.

Quantity or quality? Why not both?

Unless preceded by Meteor Strike through the ceiling.

"Divinity: Original Sin has Steamworks integration which allows for drop-in/drop-out multiplayer game play."

So Long War has this mechanic where the aliens have an internal "hate" counter which is determined by how well you're doing in the preceding month. If you're doing well then they'll direct more resources directly at fighting you, if you're doing ...not so well, then they'll focus on trying to take over countries. I guess they hate me at the moment, the order went out to send all the UFOs. There's no way I have enough healthy soldiers to tackle all this, especially since that Covert Mission is coming. Fortunately Exalt are still idiots despite their enhanced firepower.

A gruelling game of XCOM Long War, I'm taking a break now after an insane sequence of three landed Abductors, a terror mission, two Exalt missions, and a bomb disposal. The only respite in that sequence was one single regular abduction mission. I'm having fun but I wish sometimes they'd let up a bit with some down periods, a little bit of better pacing in general wouldn't go unappreciated. At least Carapace armour is coming on now, so I can not worry about being one-shot quite as often - but at $120 each and taking two weeks to manufacture, it's a slow process. I need another game that lets me relax a bit more in between sessions. Something where I could just play with my brain in first gear.

Potato Salad stretch goal: Chris Avellone makes the potato salad.

I'd say if the frequency of pausing becomes too overwhelming, even in short fights, that's frenetic. I mean I don't know if it's actually happening or not, but I can see a situation in an RTwP game where you're pausing multiple times in the time it takes to get one weapon swing or spell in (to give orders for the other party members for example) being problematic. Even if the action was going on at a glacial pace, that's way too much micromanagement. Again, hypothetically.

Hopefully it's just a matter that of the default speed setting being a bit too optimistic as opposed to a fundamental design thing of inserting too many active abilities to manage (like in RTSes). Don't have any real feedback myself, all I'm doing is creating a character, seeing how they level, then immediately trying another character, literally without even moving the previous one.

Nope, but Risen was banned due to the use of real or real-analogue drugs which are shown have positive effects. Completely made-up drugs like in Fallout are generally okay, though SR4 got in trouble for the nonspecific "Alien Narcotics". The other common reason for bans in Australia is Sexual Violence. Sex is fine, violence is fine, but never shall the two meet. South Park and SR3 and their anal probing fall under this category. Actually sex is not fine under one circumstance too: as a quest reward. The Witcher 2 had a small scene cut out because of this.

"It's an RPG" is a pretty low hurdle when it comes to talking points. Personally I have nothing to say because I've never played any PB game.