melkathi

Talk to Fionavar. You write it. He posts it. We read it.

Saw a Sally Rooney novel in the supermarket. Bought it just so I can say I can't travel to the UK for fear of getting arrested. I don't think I'll enjoy reading it

I am afraid you'l be right, and it will be one of those souls-action games. On the other hand, nothing in the trailer prevents it from doing a complete plot twist and have the characters travel forward in time to bring their rivalry into the current era to battle it out at a music event as K-Pop Idols. Then the game would be part life sim, part music industry management sim, part dating VN Unlikely, One can hope.

I don't know what to watch since I don't really like anything. I think last time I liked something was Ted Lasso, and before that Stranger (the Korean crime series). Or was it the other way around... I need to make money to make my own shows...

You wanted a simulation of the current events in the US?

I use sunscreen in the summer, when I have to be out for more than just dashing to the supermarket and back. But in Greece in the summer you should wear sunscreen. Saw the nice sunburn a friend got the other day. Really don't need that.

Bored on a weekend. So same thing.

Wait till you find out that Hexen has become a base building survival sandbox

I dove deep into the adulty parts of the interwebz and looked around a bit. Well, there is a lot of Renpy in that list, so expect those games to be a similar experience to Treasure of Nadia (so not really worth your time). Leap of Love changes the formula to at least to such extend that you are boosting your skills to impress a girl and live happily ever after - so the adult part isn't the main focus as in those other games, that are just an excuse to throw mediocre renders at you. Honestly, reading up on Leap of Love, I like the concept that you are a frog turned prince, but now you have to make sure a princes will actually want you around for ever after, so you don't get re-frogged. Adult version of Long Live The Queen, without being the queen. HuniePop is the only one on the list I actually played years and years ago. It is a decent match 3 game, and I play match 3 games to zone out. But there is so many, I have enough SFW choices that I don't need the NSFW ones. Sapphire Safari seems to be national geographics meets monster girl porn. So again at least it gets points for trying something different. Personally not my thing once more. But then again, nothing in that bundle is If I were to play any of the games on that list, it would be HuniePop for matching threes, Leap of Love for helping an amphibian out, or Sapphire Safari as a walking simulator. But match 3s and walking simulators you have better choices in the SFW part of gaming, because as always, those aspects of a game you aren't interested in do affect the ones you are - dev time is limited. For example the devs who thought King Arthur Knight's Tale needs a VS mode, took time away from the programmers that could have been used to properly integrate the free dlc into the campaign. Which means, meh. I wouldn't waste my time if I were you.

I watched Escape from Pretoria yesterday. Lots of actors trying to get accents right

I am not too bothered. It is the voice acting I find annoying, similar to, but not as bad as Expeditions: Rome. Voice actors do a generic "foreign" accent that is supposed to cover the whole Mediterranean and sounds nothing like anyone from anywhere in the world - unless voice actors are actually all from Voiceactorlandia and that is the voiceactorlandian accent. I enjoyed Total War: Troy. Only TW game I managed to finish a campaign. But I have been starving for a non-medival fantasy RPG. I would love an Elder Scrolls type game in a different fantasy setting. Something based on India or Mesopotamia or somewhere that hasn't been done to death. If only Carnal Instinct weren't a porn game :/ Take out the porn and give it proper funding, that game would be fun...

I am playing the original Titan Quest because with 2 coming out, I realised I never did.

I tried a new run of MechWarrior 5. It is fascinating how much a dev team can do wrong. The new scrapyard maps added with dlc are the worst maps I have ever played in any game. The AI is completely incapable of navigating them and gets stuck on bits of terrain every few meters. The AI gets worse/better with difficulty. At normal difficulty, when reaching higher tier missions, the allied AI started to dumb down noticeably, to the point where it would simply stop firing and stand there, allowing the enemy AI destroy the mechs. As the enemy AI gets significant stat boosts across the board, including turning speed, acceleration, cooldown time on weapons, damage and armour (so much armour), it meant that a light mech could almost take down a full lance of heavy mechs, while a heavy mech could take down your whole lance. Of course AI mechs never overheat. So, it becomes increasingly frustrating and unrewarding to play this. The first impression is "What a great mech sandbox". And then the game works at a steady pace to deconstruct that.

The Chained God is definitely worth it, as it directly continues the story after the end of game save. The other two seasonal updates with the Sidhe I lost interest in. All the seasonal content starts at the end of campaign save - so you go back to a save before you played the other dlc. It is a bit odd.

Did that include the "dlc" missions against the fomorians?

Yeah, with all the restaurants around, that something smells a bit burned every now and then, doesn't ring alarm bells - it just makes me think "What idiot didn't maintain their Dunstabzugshaube?" (yeah, I think that word in German) Also it is summer, there are fires around Athens every year and the whole city can smell of ash... And I can be absentminded or hyperfocus.

Work problems this week have made my depression resurface. So today I felt so bad, I thought I couldn't breathe and that I would collapse on the floor. So I dragged myself downstairs to check if there is a nice wind in the garden and maybe sit there, or close the garden door and drag myself back upstairs and collapse in bed. When I got to the garden I found myself face to face with a nearly solid cloud of smoke. To the point where you would have had trouble to see your extended arm. And as I had all windows open, the smoke was getting throughout the house. Turns out it wasn't depression. Idiot neighbour across the street had a kitchen fire in the restaurant. I guess it is "just" smoke inhalation.

wrong thread

I played the Cthulhu Keeper playtest. It is a buggy proof of concept. But there is a fun game in there. You build a hidden temple to the elder gods, staffed by cultists, protected by shoggoths, mi-gos, deep ones, shambling horrors, etc. And you travel the world with missions in the line of Commandos and those other stealthy games. Verdict: the proof of concept proves the concept.

Same gameplay with new characters and a few different abilities. It only has one morality axis - you either do good or do evil. That is a bit disappointing. It also has a very small cast of heroes. You recruit the full team and that's it. They can't die though. About 20+ hours of gameplay. A bit more compact, but since you like the original you will like this. And the characters have different enough gameplay to the original classes that it doesn't go stale.

One mission, because of healing, I ended up with three knights on the team who can give extra action points to others. That made for an interesting run, with one knight supercharged, running around like speedy gonzales. My Balan got an artifact pretty early on that let him teleport to the next enemy on kill. Love items like that. Waiting to see what you think of the stand alone roman expansion.

Finished Wind and Truth or what the Stormlight Archive book is called. It is the worst book in the series. Not Sanderson's worst book in general, but it shows that he no longer has editors who'll tell him the truth when the truth hurts. The time jumps are so annoying, the book is 1400 pages with no flow, because every 70 pages the book jumps back 9, 17, 4000 or even 10000 years. Sanderson's insistence to ruin every single female character by making them split personalities instead of giving them character growth, has made Shallan's character unsalvageable, try as he may. At least the first arc is over and it seriously reduces the "need" to keep up with the series. Started The King of the Spoil. It is a Warhammer 40K attempt at cyberpunk. The setting feels a bit off for the type of story.

I think they made it a bit more lenient with recruiting heroes. At first you had to recruit them the moment they became available or they were gone. Basically punishing players for not having characters die. They wanted this to be the "hardcore your heroes perma-die every other mission" experience. The game is a series of a lot of dumb design choices. It is a surprise they still managed to produce a fun game - it happened completely by accident and counter to all efforts by the dev team Faery Knight was among my top choices. Balan, Guinevere, Morgawse, Faery Knight, while Leodegrance, Bedievere, Geraint, and Boudicea got swapped in whenever others were healing. I mostly missed out on trying Morgana because of her just not filling a spot that wasn't covered by my other heroes.

Good choice. Other than Dindraine and Boudica, all wimin are old faith :P