IlyaP

Erm...I...thought...Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II was pretty cool?

Man, remember when we enjoyed Star Wars? Thems was the days.

Didn't romance anyone. Don't really derive much player satisfaction from in-game romances, never have, going as far back as BG2.

At least he tried? Better than not at all, right?

My pal Karlach? I could never let her down! Had to take care of my favorite gal and make sure someone was looking after her, so I ended up going to Avernus with her.

Some of the stuff shown in the movie - especially when inside the speed force early on in the first half of the movie in particular, is apparently intentional, as the director, Andy Muschietti, wanted to give viewers a sense of something different, and strange, to convey the weirdness of what Barry experiences. Points for at least thinking about these things and wanting to try something weird and different?

Welp, I finally finished Baldur's Gate IIII, and that was a thoroughly underwhelming set of fights, but the post-boss battle stuff was Very Extremely Charming and Heartwarming. Apparently previous versions of the game prior to the latest patch just had slide cards a la Dragon Age: Origins and Pillars of Eternity/Deadfire?

Only came across this absolute beast of a read this morning, but for anyone interested in the history of the development of Morrowind, Polygon have a gigantic oral history that they published back in 2019: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda

Finally watched Dune: Part One. Good stuff. Seeing Part Two in cinemas tomorrow. (Avoided part one in cinemas 'cause of the spicy cough.)

Atom Team, who in late 2018 released Atom RPG, a Wasteland/Fallout-inspired cRPG, have a new cRPG in development, that's inspired by Bioware's Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale titles. Titlted Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy, it has graphics that are slightly reminiscent of Sword Coast Legends, and like Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire, provides the option to switch between real-time with pause and turn-based combat. It looks to have also been at least partially funded via Kickstarter, and they've got a Discord server up and running, and players can apply for beta testing. More details can be found at this Reddit post.

Same. They have a right to live, and hopefully they can get guidance, or build a community, or feed off animals in the underdark, rather than cause chaos above-ground. Maybe Jarlaxle can help out, if he's still alive in this timeline. (Is the game even considered like, part of the official FR timeline?)

Yeah, the combat is...frequently not very interesting, in part because it doesn't provide me with the kind of dopamine hit that I find rewarding - which actually *isn't* loot ("ph4t lewt yo!"), but lore or character info. Which makes it a very different kind of combat experience to that of, say, Tyranny or Deadfire, by comparison. (I also just really don't like the way the game indicates how far characters can move, with the little white dots. It's not always easy to see against certain backgrounds/surfaces, and I can see how someone with color-blindness issues could get frustrated, and it makes me wish that there was, at least, an option to enable tiles - a feature common to many turn-based cRPGs. Including ones you won't play 'cause they're, like, old man. ) It's also clear that Larian are fans of CDPR, as evidenced by this screenshot.

Building on this: one of my closest friends back in Beantown hails from Goa and we met in college, and we'd spend our evenings drinking whiskey and playing C&C: Generals like there was no tomorrow, and his folks had absolutely no problem with it whatsoever. His housemate, who hailed from Malaysia, would join us as well, and the three of us had *the best times* having 3-way destructothons in Generals and then going to classes during the day and working in-between them. And I know both friends are still gamers to this day, despite having gotten married and having had kids. So for whatever it's worth dude, like, it's a legit real hobby, and honestly one of the better ones to have. I know there's a proclivity towards high-status jobs and having a healthy social life in parts of India, but you can do both of those things and still enjoy videogames. (It took my Very Soviet parents a few years to savvy this, but they got there in the end, and accepted their son was never going to be an engineer or mathematician, and was a gamer for life.)

Meanwhile, because of Rod, I'm back on the DOS2 train again. The game is just so aggressively gorgeous (especially the sound design), and an oddly relaxing thing to help keep me awake during the day after a bout with insomnia last night.

Remember to consider that $nPlayer=/=Unique_Transaction. Remember how the bottom of the screen allows for multiple "player instances"? It's entirely likely that their databases are looking at that alongside purchase data and making some potentially erroneous inferences. (As in, two people in a household are playing the game, and each one's been identified as a unique player, but there was only one financial transaction made when buying the game.) It's still good numbers and optics regardless, but the wording in their post suggests they don't want to reveal how many actual financial transactions took place. (Companies seem to not like revealing that kind of data, for...reasons that hurt my brain to try and understand.)

Nope. Nope nope nope nope. Noping right the hell out of that video.

I know plenty of adults here in Australia, where, when we met, nerded out like school children discovering sugar for the first time, over our favorite games, what we all liked in common, etc. We've multiple friends here with kids who are gamers. Multiple friends who don't have kids but are dating/engaged/married who are massive gamers. Hell, I have a Pillars of Eternity tattoo and my wife has an Elder Scrolls-inspired wedding ring. My best friend back home was and still is a WoW junkie before he met and after he met his wife and continued playing FF14 and WoW after their kids were born. To think *anyone* would be critical of gaming in this day and age is weird to me, and makes me think that maybe you're just not meeting your found family or "your" people. Like, not kidding - we have buses here that I've driven past where they had WoW ads plastered across the sides of them. I've seen digital ads for CoD games in downtown Sydney. We even have a giant gaming cafe/club/bar...thing, called Fortress here.

Sure, if he were doing a research survey, then, yeah, I can see how that would be an issue. But for the purposes of just identifying a few people who don't fit the stereotype established in the heads of his relatives, it can be useful to at least present other models of personhood or behaviour.

See also: the astounding level of scientific depth on display in the Factorio community.

The 14 or so pages of notes I took for Myst, including making sketches, was indicative of some kind of merit, as it applied my drawing skills. To say nothing of the obvious merit of more "literary", creative problem-solving skills utilising games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Syberia, and even in its own fascinating way, Walden. And it's a hobby that develops and engages with soft and hard skills and reasoning and logic skills, patience development, horizontal thinking, pattern recognition development, and more.

Point to the number of adults here who have rich and developed social lives, partners/spouses/whatever, jobs, who still get exercise in their day, plenty of sleep, and do all sorts of other shit. It's a valid hobby. I have friends who had babies and kept the baby in the rocker next to them hoping the damn thing would go the frell to sleep while they played any number of games to keep themselves sane. As a friend recently said to me: "We're the first generation that's normalised videogaming as a valid hobby, and when we have kids, none of us are going to be shaming each other for playing whatever we enjoy while the baby sleeps next to us as we rock it sleep or breast feed it or whatever." My parents eventually came around to it because I also made a job out of it as a games journalist and travelled around North America, got paid, etc., but that's obviously outside the norm. So just collect stories from here, about the well-adjusted folks here who went "yeah, I'm not into sports, or working on cars, but hell, I can assemble a computer, I can teach computer literacy, and fix stuff, and have unconsciously come to accept that my skills are taken for granted by my elderly relatives who think I can somehow MacGuyver an EMP and fix their computer in five minutes time". If that's not good enough, show them My Grandpa and Asheron's Call and tell them about Shirley Curry. And then ask them how they like them apples.

Oh I've yet to finish DOS2. I'm still making my way through it. I know the combat gets absolutely ridiculous in later parts of the game, but that's a future me problem, as far as I'm concerned.

It's not...I struggle to think of it as a spoiler, since the game makes it clear from the get-go that part of your goal is to get off the island - which would logically involve a ship. And at some point you've got to get off the island - otherwise the game would be extremely short.

They rejoin the party early in Chapter 2, mid-way through a ship sequence, so the above isn't exactly accurate.

I only played it for the first time recently and thought it was fine?