melkathi

So I have been looking at the task manager while playing New Arc Line. On average the game is around 2.600-4.100MB memory usage. When it loads a map it goes just above 11.000MB. That seems like a lot...

I messed around with the graphics settings in New Arc Line and now it doesn't crash. Which means I now had a "choice that matters" and I hate those. For me, ethically it is an easy choice - don't force the factory to replace the workers with automatons, because I don't want people to loose their jobs. But, that is the choice that benefits a magic playthrough and this is my Diesel Engineer...

I have a game breaking bug with New Arc Line where the game crashes if I try to leave the area I am in. Personally I believe it is some resource leak that corrupts the character's save files. But I am not a dev. I have put it aside for now and hope they fix it.

Today I slashed my wrist. I was cutting custom tiles to make a table with my art. On the very last tile the cutting line hadn't been deep enough so the tile snapped badly and went straight for my wrist. Good thing the pharmacy is only a minute away, so they patched me up. Lesson to be learned from this: When the internet says "wear gloves, accidents happen", wear gloves, accidents happen. Of course when it comes down to it, it's a win win situation: I got an awesome table and I can impress the ladies with my bandages hand

Tried the demo for MENACE and absolutely disliked it. Uninstalled after 5 minutes.

I hope the writing is better than in that video

I tried the demo for MINOS. It is a dungeon defense game where you play the Minotaur and kill ancient greek warriors entering your maze to kill you. It is a rogue like, where you unlock traps and upgrades, but if you die, you lose everything but XP and start again from depth 0. Each level you can build and tear down walls to create paths for the heroes to walk down. You set traps on trap points. And some other nasty things more freely (like deadly doors that kill the third hero to walk through). Kinda nice bite sized dungeon defense fun.

Age of Wonders 4 is a true Paradox title with the third expansion pass announced.

I like games with newspapers. Though I believe they could have done it a bit better. Cute little detail Crafting The Pulp Fiction moment When the quest giver tells you to find out yourself how to do the quest.

I have started New Arc Line. There are currently three races to choose from: Human, Elf, and Dwarf. Humans and Dwarves can choose between Diesel Tech and Voodoo Shaman as classes. Dwarves choose between Steam Tech and Hellfire Mage. I am trying out a human Dieselpunk Gunslinger. The writing... has some problems. On the one hand, a lot of writers, they try too much. Lots of words, lots of fancy words, all to prove "Look ma, I have a vocabulary." I do not like that. Other people do. The writers seem to not have English as their mother tongue. The odd mistake here and there. The attempt to write "British" characters, with slang and all, without understanding the slang - thinking they do because they watched Austin Powers. We'll see though how the story goes. Mr Simon made a great first impression as NPCs go. Unlike Mick... who is a bit boring. Why is it so often in RPGs, that the first character to join your party is boring? I hope the story works out as interesting. Somehow other than Arcanum, there hasn't been a good tech vs magic RPG - Silverfall fell a bit short and was also a long long time ago. The game is a bit unstable. Trying to load a previous save can crash the game for me That's Early Access I guess.

I finished the main plot in Hogwarts Legacy. Overall I think it is a good game. A bit too Elder Scrolls like perhaps and a bit too collection focused. I think every bit of content overstays its welcome just a tad. The good thing is, for the bonuses you don't need to do everything. Just over half the Merlin Trials unlock max inventory. You can ignore the other forty something trials. The game doesn't force you to do every repetitive thing. The writing works. The plot works. The endless hordes of enemies do not work for a game that is focused on such a small area. The hundreds of poachers you kill mean you basically depopulated the wider area around Hogwarts and Hogsmead. Some comments the characters make are very on point. When your character wonders why nobody has looted the chests in the dungeon, even though you known it has been explored before. When you wonder why your professor has very specific ingredients for a potion on hand. Whoever wrote the story has felt those plot quibbles themselves and isn't above some self irony when they find themselves in that situation. It's the exact type of little thing that wins me over. The combat is fun. It is far more involved than a lot of action rpgs. The different spell combos and the way different spells may uniquely interact with different enemies are great. I still need to figure out how to hit a troll with their club. I don't like all the voice actors. I understand criticism that it is less a game about going to wizarding school and more a run around kill stuff game. I don't know how a school simulator would have been fun though.

Nope, it just means that Disney are lazy. They think they need to add one very scary scene into almost every movie because it is their shortcut for emotional responses. Just as they so often kill off a family member to make the audience bond with the protagonist - they use shortcuts. The Lion King is not so complex a story that a five year old can't understand it. But a lot of five year olds get scared at that one scene.

I was in the alpha for that, just never actually had time to do any testing at all. I feel a bit bad about that

Incidentally, every parent has to do that with Disney movies. Everyone loves the Lion king, but everyone who has watched it with a smaller child has fast forwarded past the scary badlands scene.

That is one of those annoying things that make me certain developers aren't gamers: Let me disable the unfun things and enjoy your game.

When you get one of those emails telling you you received money and all you need to do is check the attached file, then you hover over the sender - out of curiosity - and the address is @ troy The file comes from Troy? So it is by definition a Trojan file? In a way I don't even begrudge them any money they swindle out of people.

While they are both called sumthin Colony, they are rather different games.

It created this whole genre of movies and at the time was something completely new. But when you look at plot, character depth (wet footprint stepping out of the shower), weeeell we had seen better even then. And when you compare it to the James Bond movies that came after, when the movie makers knew this was something people wanted, you can see how much more effort they started putting in for those.

I watched Dr No in the outdoor cinema this year. I didn't remember how bad that movie actually was. But it made history. So many things in later movies were directly inspired by it, including the villain dying in a tank of liquid, with just the hand above the water as he dies.

Tonight they are showing Casablanca. You may of course not have heard of this movie as it is ultra contemporary. It is basically about the current state of the world, talking about resistance against fascism as well as the plight of refugees trying to reach the USA.

Last thing I watched in the cinema was Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda...

I just got my first vivarium and tamed some beasts. Need to meet Sebastian at the village to visit Anne. The first movie was really good. It did a great job at introducing a magical place and have it feel magical. You miss nothing by not reading the books. What stands out to me with Hogwarts Legacy is that unlike so many AAA titles aimed at an older audience, Hogwarts Legacy managed to have different body types. You have some people lean, some people with a bit more weight. You have old adults, you have young adults, you have children in their early teens you have children in their mid teens. Yes, predominantly they use one bodytype, especially as there is basically one human for all the poachers/ashwinders, but that is only because they created one enemy model, not because they generate every npc from one model as other games do.

It is getting to a point where they might as well bring it out as freeware..

I just got to the point where your teacher teaches you how to do stealth kills.

Hogwarts Legacy is a very disturbing game. 1) "Why are the goblins evil?" "They are starting a rebellion demanding equal rights." "Oh, how dreadful! Let's kill them!" With the player character making some actually very gaslighting comments on defeating them. 2) The player killing spiders with remarks on the lines of "If only you didn't look so disgusting". Killing wolves by the dozens. Then killing poachers (human beings) and stating "Now beasts are safe." The irony. And the people you kill are the dark wizards? 3) The school giving you a magic guide book that keeps track of your progress, and which the teachers can review to assess your progress. This quest log, journal etc, of course keeps your kill count. So it is a Hogwarts where Professor Weasely sits in front of the fireplace with a glass of wine in the evening and goes "Oh, my star pupil has killed 17 people today. That is 8 more than yesterday. They are really improving fast. I better arrange for them to learn some more spells."