Humanoid

Uhh, Half-Life 2?

1) Open the curtains so I can hear it louder. (My curtains are usually closed any time of day) 2) File a lost luggage report, then go do something else to get my mind off the annoyance. 3) Huh, free Christmas tree lights, I wonder where they came from?

Wrapped up Privateer, starting the session with the damned Exploratory Service missions out of Rygannon. In my various Privateer binges over the years I've usually pulled the plug without bothering to do this mission series, maybe only done it two or three times ever. The reason, as always, is Gothri. Gothri in asteroid fields. Four Gothri in asteroid fields. Four Gothri and a giant green egg in asteroid fields. Rygannon 3 and 4 took a few attempts each to manage, dying on each occasion more than in the rest of the game combined. After that, wrapping up the game was a breeze, albeit a tedious one spent afterburning across entire systems while being relentlessly chased by an invincible foe. After all these years, this game still has the best credits presentation ever. I play often enough to not be surprised by the game, but the sharp and pointed verbal sparring our bastard of a hero engages in never fails to make me grin. Reminds me of how bland the mainline series can often be, Maniac aside. Anyway, I have my gun, my beautiful Steltek gun, which no one is ever going to take away from me. Now to fire up Righteous Fire...

Odd, they showed up for me using print screen.

That was the initial two-week delay. The further delay appears to be due to some other shenanigans - obviously one is tempted to blame publisher interference but nothing actually revealed yet.

All in all it was a bit too grim and oppressive for me to enjoy the story, but I had a blast just doing the random things around the city. There's a bit of a dissonance there between the rather severe player character and the ridiculous hijinks you can get up to, which is obviously not a problem Saints Row suffers from. Heck, they should just licence out their Hong Kong map for other developers to build games in. It's always a shame to make something like this and to only get to use it once before discarding it.

So I picked up EVE from the Humble daily because why not, then predictably spent altogether too long on character creation to the point I logged off and did something else immediately after. Came back to it later in the afternoon to do the tutorial, but it completely failed to grab me: as far as I can tell, it's a game based around selecting options from a multitude of drop-down menus. So eh, that's enough for now, but given that a month's sub is included I might try again later. What did happen after was almost predictable however. My itch for a space game having been tickled, I fired up Privateer and started a fresh game. Suddenly it's 2am. Oops. God I love this game. Twenty years on though, I still keep making the same gameplay mistakes I made back then. Neglecting to restock my missiles. Forgetting to buy sector maps after getting my jump drive. Underestimating the engine upgrade needed to fuel my latest gizmos. Buying a new ship too early and not having enough cash left over to kit it out. Forgetting I can't make stopovers during delivery missions. But I have my Centurion now and all is good with the world ....even though my current loadout is two missile launchers and no guns at all.

Could always just buy a cheap Pentium or whatever as a stopgap if it comes to the worst.

Reading the latest Long War changelog, and I think I'm done with the mod. There's such a thing as taking things too far, and additions such as SMGs, battle rifles, machine pistols and bloody sawn-off shotguns are ridiculous, especially considering there'll be five or six tiers of just about each of those weapons. It's just turning into some guy's military power fantasy instead of an intelligent consideration of good, balanced gameplay. God, I hope someone forks this project and just keeps the bare minimum class system, fatigue system and a balanced mission frequency to take advantage of those mechanics. Everything else I'm happy to toss out, frankly. Aside, juuuuust about done with Broken Sword 5, am at what I assume is the final location. Verdict ....s'alright. No regrets, but it's plainly obvious when compared to say, Broken Age, that it feels a lot rougher and generally 'indie' than the more polished productions. If not for the IP, it'd be just another adventure game like the dozens of others I have on GOG/HB/Steam and am yet to play.

I guess you'll just have to do it using the honour system. Call time outs when you need to change something. :D

The very first Google hit on the subject seems to be exactly what's needed - Soundboard plugin for Teamspeak.

Hell, at that price I'd buy two and forget having a spindle drive. :D But seriously yeah, that's a performance-oriented SSD for a budget SSD price.

I have no friends (in a literal sense, I have no gamer friends at all in the city I currently live in) so that's probably not going to be an advantage. A year or so back I tried Disney Infinity which appears to have a similar figure-based system when I was visiting my sister. It was completely terrible, so it's a low hurdle for Skylanders to beat. (My read on the situation is that the Disney game is a knockoff of the whole Skylanders thing?)

I have no idea what Skylanders is, but it appears to be next to impossible for me to buy a Wii U without getting it bundled, so I guess I'll find out soon enough. ($279AUD for basic console + Skylanders + Mario Kart 8, time for me to bite)

Maybe they could be an optional download or something. Heck, in the 90s you might've been able to choose to play redbook audio straight off the CD, or some MIDI music.

I relied on the autosave for the entire game and haven't been burnt.

I've tried watching some gameplay video of Half-Life 2 a few times over the years. Each time it's swiftly given me a bout of motion sickness. Now that I think of it, Bloodlines may have induced some level of discomfort for me as well, but one nowhere nearly as bad. But this just suggests that I might have a problem with the Source engine specifically, since I don't recall any other video game ever having that effect on me. On another note, resolved my crashing problem with Broken Sword 5, which is to say, have worked around it based on information provided by a kind soul on the GOG forums. Revolution themselves haven't been any help with the issue, because I can't even register on their forums, the activation email never comes through (and have tried a couple times, and it's not in the held queue for spam). It seems the backer portal on their site has vanished as well, not sure what's happening there. As for the workaround - well, it's apparently based on the notion that there is a missing asset that causes the crash, but if you play the game at a lower resolution, a different, lower-detail version of said asset is loaded instead, and that works fine. For most people, simply setting the game to windowed mode was sufficient to do this, but the window is not dynamically resizable, it's set at a fixed proportion of your desktop resolution. I'd been playing on windowed mode all along, so at 2560x1440 desktop resolution, clearly my window was still too large. Dropping my desktop resolution then re-enabling windowed mode finally got me through.

The only Source engine game I've played is Bloodlines. I didn't even get that far. The requirement of metagaming combat by reducing enemy HP as much as possible without killing them completely put me off the game and I haven't been back since. It's nonsensical and makes me rather combat be excluded from the game altogether. I can't remember if there was a difficulty setting, but even if so it just makes it a chore rather than abjectly dumb. Could be the way you play the game, but I've also noticed I've become less critical towards certain games as time go by. Dragon Age for example, almost hated the damn thing when it came out but year or two later I actually liked it when I went back to it. So it's kind of learning to take things as they are, at least in my case. And actually, the Banner Saga is just one of the games that show I have the complete opposite tendency. I become more critical of games with the passing of time, without actually having to play them. At the time I put it down initially my thoughts were along the lines of "this is a little silly, I'll come back to it later", which has been slowly evolving into "that was idiotic, I don't want to do that ever again". Dragon Age is probably another good example, went from initial impressions of thinking it a reasonable if sometimes overlong game, gradually boiling down to feeling that it's an earnest attempt (one thing that its sequel didn't have) that eventually fell completely flat on its face.

I seem to remember from the patch notes that the game at least will tell you what region you're in at any given moment. Prior to that it only informed you, and very briefly at that, when you technically enter that particular zone. There was also the one riddle that wasn't so much of a riddle as much as a vocabulary test. You either know that word and get it instantly, or you don't and are completely stumped.

The highest difficulty should be "normal".

VGA connectors are still used a lot in business because, lot of older projectors and the like in use. Most business laptops worth their salt will still have D-sub alongside mini-DP or mini-HDMI. Conversely, laptops more than a few years old will probably have no video output other than VGA. But yeah, HDMI (at least more recent revisions of it) support 1440p, however my U2711 screens don't because of some hardware limitation. So the point is all elements in the chain have to support it, the video card, the cable and the monitor. That said, if it's only going to be for the WiiU then it's irrelevant anyway since it's strictly 1080p.

Was going to buy Democracy 3 at the current Humble sale, but it looks like they're only just selling a Steam copy, which makes no sense given that it's available from both GOG and direct from the developers DRM-free. Ah well, waiting.

Hit a terminal bug on Broken Sword 5, save says about 80% through the game. Blah. Reports missing animation. Now obviously people have completed the game, so it might be my version, GOG patched to version 1.11. Seen the reported by others with no present resolution, and have reinstalled my game to no avail, so it's either some incompatibility or the current GOG version is problematic.

Register at World of Trucks and get the Metallic paint DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 for free. Pointless perhaps, but free is free.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00JEN10EE