Humanoid

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.

It's odd because in the flesh, the keycaps actually look pretty much halfway between the washed-out look in my photo, and the oversaturated look on the store page, and they strike a happy medium for me. Not pastel by my definition of the term, but also not quite as searingly garish as a potential buyer might be led into thinking. At any rate, I was after a set of affordable (~$50) caps with traditional lettering and at the time the Tai Hao range seemed to fit the bill, and I simply picked the colour scheme that fit my mood at the time. There was a trap however as a lot of the models have an awful "anti-bacterial" coating that's best avoided, had to grab the non-coated variant through Massdrop if I remember right. The keyboard is actually also a (non-RGB) Das 4, it was originally one of the "Ultimate" models, i.e. the ones with blank keycaps, which I bought because it was significantly discounted (compared to the price of the regular "Professional" version. To be honest I don't love it, the flange is a bit too wide because I have a quirk where I anchor my left pinkie to the edge of the keyboard when typing. I now have some electrical tape lining the edge because the metal edge hurts my pinkie, especially as the paint has increasingly worn out and exposed the bare metal underneath. I do like that the media buttons are wholly separate though, hate keyboard with Fn alternate-mode media keys. Downside is that the actual buttons are pretty rubbish though. EDIT: I think what's also happening is that my room lighting is actually very warm, but Android/Sony's image processing is automatically removing it, so how it looks in photos is probably what it might look like if I took it outdoors. In person it looks a lot greener because of the yellow-tinted light. Anyway, a photo with less glare, though still not great. You can just make out the taped up left edge (and covered numlock LED), plus the paint wearing out on the bottom-left edge.

Probably my potato camera phone, they're Tai Hao Miami keycaps.

So a couple years ago when I built my current desktop, an Amazon shipping issue meant I ended up with four 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix 3600C16 DDR4 kits instead of two. So in the grand tradition of false economies, I figured I should use that RAM before it becomes obsolete. I've already built myself a new HTPC with one of the spare kits, but I was at a loss at what to do with the other. So completely pointlessly, I decided to build the smallest mini-ITX build I could come up with. I have no reason to have done this build, I don't need this PC at all. But here it is. Specs: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Noctua NH-L9a Gigabyte A520I ac 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix 3600MHz CL16 1TB WD SN570 Silverstone Milo 10 case Silverstone AD120-DC PSU First time using one of these PicoPSU things. It's the weird circuit board installed in the case behind that plastic sheet pictured on the right, above. Connects to an external power brick. I'm a dummy and forgot to update the BIOS before doing anything else, but I wasn't punished for it as fortunately the BIOS it shipped with was compatible with the APU out-of-the-box. Booted up okay first time, now to use my Win7 Family Pack upgrade kit (three upgrade licences of Win7 Home) for, oh, about the dozenth time.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a bug where regardless of the hit calculations, the game relies on Unreal Engine to do its thing and trace the path of the projectile from the shooter to the target. If the game engine fails to resolve the shot graphically, then you lose the hit even if it's 100%.

Well, that's literally what happened with E.T. at least, so there's precedent.

I only want one improvement and that's stealth takedowns. Anything else is just fluff.

Yeah, I did a JA2 run a year or so ago. I did sort of burn out towards the end where you were encouraged to do those truly monster battles, but at least it's right at the end. Feel the same with Long War Alien Base Assaults which have a cap of ten soldiers, but then maybe it's because those missions are so long and repetitive anyway. But I have no issue controlling eight soldiers for standard missions, especially once you get MECs and flight which reduces the demands on specific positioning.

That was true for me, 20-25 years ago. I liked the big parties and optimising them, and in general I was a completionist, a min-maxer, I consulted the most thorough walkthroughs on GameFAQs, etc. To be honest, the IWD2 thing was probably the anomaly back then, it was more an experimental thing since obviously there were no NPCs with actual personalities to bring along. It was probably during my DA:O run (which I never finished) where I had an epiphany that I no longer enjoyed this style of gameplay in RPGs, even if the next generation of solo character RPGs hadn't quite arrived for me yet (unless you count WoW which I was playing a lot of at the time). Yeah, games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 were out, but I didn't like them either. It took Obsidian and CDPR making games in that style to convince me that it was now my preferred way to play RPGs. Don't get me wrong, I still can enjoy a good tactical game like XCOM - I've put 1000 hours or so into Long War - but as its own thing and not as the basis for an RPG.

Looking into the XP sharing thing and yeah, seems the XP sharing may be adequate for my needs, and if not then it probably isn't too difficult to manually adjust things. However, the big sacrifice from an RP perspective is probably that I will need to go full spoiler mode on prospective party members - their classes, their personalities, and when I even get them - so I can pre-plan the party I'll take for the rest of the game.

That's encouraging. I remember trying to get through IWD2 some two decades ago with a party of two, but having to yield and add two more characters midway through.