I will definitely watch that GOT video today. I accidentally made the mistake of missing the first 7 seasons when they first came out, then 3 months ago I binged 10 minute YouTube videos wildly out of order. Really not ideal, but when it first came out the episode I saw made a bad impression... the sex/violence/dialogue seemed pretty gratuitous and I didn't realise back then how good the casting and scheming was.

I'm now onboard to watch 8 in real time at least. Did I hear right that the entire wrap up is 5 or 6 episodes? That barely seems like enough time to do more than just let the characters complete their respective arcs.

No idea if you can take this deal outside the UK, but I just bought into Battletech for £10.59 at WinGameStore. 5% more off with code PCGAMES5OFF.

After years of dilligence, this is the first time ever I've explicitly bought a game to put straight on the backlog!

If I'm hungry for more after Long War I may well do that. It's definitely a shame to give up the other WotC content, along with the full version of the Better Advent mod.

Cutter wrote on Mar 21, 2019, 12:32:
Haven't even heard of any of them except RDR2. Are they all mobile and console games?

Celeste is an incredible precision platformer from the Towerfall guys.

Into the Breach is a great coffee time puzzle game that looks like a tactics game but plays more like solving chess problems. Fantastic design but I can't bring myself to play in long bursts because the game flow is pretty slow. You do a small number of very important moves and spend about 90% of the time in the think tank, staring at the screen! Awesome and cheap though. More proof that the FTL guys have a magic touch.

Obra Dinn is a story puzzle game with a supernatural gimmick where you walk around inside a freeze frame of the moments before someone's death, and look for clues to find out what happened. Original concept and I've heard lots of good things but haven't played it.

Beat Saber is a VR rhythmn game where you wave lightsabers around and hit targets to the music. Seems like great family fun if that's your thing.

I tried to get into War of the Chosen twice and ended up parking the game both times. I think fighting the Chosen and the Lost is too much of a chore. Regular Squad versus Pod is the good shit, and to me the expansion gets you spending too much time doing not that. I'm now into a straight XCom 2 Long War run, and I am having much more fun so far.

Saw Llamachomp stream some of this today, seems like an interesting prospect. Good looking, first person Factorio with friends must have a chance of catching on. I don't think multiplayer is stable yet though, they had a few CTDs in the first hour.

I'm starting to lose hope that there will ever be a Super Cars III

Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld are basically the standouts in their field, I don't know of anything else of a similar size in the same space. These are not exactly the same, but maybe Prison Architect or Banished with mods?

Edit: Oxygen not Included maybe? Or an early access game more similar to Dwarf Fortress: Odd Realm. Haven't seen it played though.

(I should mention that I've had only Civ 6 for a month and I am not a pro by any means.)

In general I like what they've done with the design of individual mechanics to make them fun and interesting. For example with city building - in previous games you stack up all your buildings on the city centre tile and their benefits stack up there. In Civ 6, your buildings sprawl over the hexes within your city borders. You build industrial/culture/science/military/harbour districts, each on a hex near your city, and build your campus/barracks/market/temple inside those districts. There are all sorts of adjacency bonuses... some districts get boosts from adjacent mountains, industrial get a boost from resources with mines or quarries, some districts get a boost from being in a triangle with 2 other districts and so on. When you arrange things well, the tile and building yields go up and it's pretty satisfying. Wonders are built into specific tiles as well, and they also all play into the adjacency bonuses in various ways. It's a whole layer of new thinking on top of just stacking up buildings, and it's a puzzle to solve to get the most out of your cities that affects how you appraise city locations. I haven't cracked it yet but I really enjoy this part.

I really didn't like City States in 5. Civ has a wonderful system for building on resources, teching up and investing in military units... why on earth would you make an additional system where cities can't engage in regular diplomacy, where they monitor what tech level the world is at and spawn units on a timer? It was feature bloat to me; a new set of mechanics that replicated existing mechanics in a more basic and less organic way, and I never liked it. In Civ 6, that isn't completely solved (city states expand their borders but don't colonise) but they are better at letting the main civs put pressure on each other indirectly. You get a slow income of envoys and you spend them on City states. You can complete objectives for city states to get free envoys. You get bonuses for investing in city states and a special bonus for having more envoys with a city state than anyone else, including the ability to levy troops when needed. So if you have frosty relations with someone, you can attack and pay off a nearby city state to instantly get 5-10 more units to attack with. You are competing with all players for all city states so it throws up interesting situations and hotspots quite often. Again they refined a feature into something more fun than before.

The combat is pretty similar to 5, it's the same 1 unit per time system, except now you can merge units which helps avoid overcrowding. I'd say stacks of death were probably the feature I liked least in 4 and I think this makes fighting more fun.

Across the board there are improvements like that that I find myself liking the design of. AI leaders get agendas that change from game to game, that you can comply with or defy which affects diplomacy. Diplomacy and spying gets you an information access level with other civs, and you get gossip messages about what those players can see, to keep tabs on who is building a wonder, declaring war and so on. Your great people and archaeologists get great works and relics, which you install in your culture buildings for culture and tourism, with bonuses for collecting matching sets. You get the idea.

As someone who is not as fast to pick things up as they used to be, I have found that there is lots to do in this game but it's pretty easy to understand, at least to get playing. Maximising is another matter and I am not there yet. The interface and general presentation really help, 6 is extremely polished in that regard and very good looking. I guess in terms of advice I would just say to watch a Quill18 Civ 6 stream since he knows what he's doing and plays at a good pace.

As someone who loved 4, and was put off by some of the design choices and gaminess of 5, I've really enjoyed Civ 6. The worst decisions in 5 seem to have been walked back, or at least refined into something more fun. I like the tone and the presentation as well, it's interesting that people complained about the visuals when it first came out.

I will say though, for a signature feature I think the environment mechanics are pretty underwhelming. The disasters are just random events on a theme and barely change the decisions you'll be making. The mechanism changes like grievances and world congress are far more interesting to me. Combined with more of everything and it was an easy purchase. Via 2game the steam key was £25 down from £34 on launch night, I don't understand how a game gets reduced like that at launch but I'm not complaining.

Haven't played the DLC yet but I really recommend game if you fancy a lighter 4x/wargame hybrid. With no diplomacy and trade systems, it's fighting for territory all the way with fast turns and spending most of your time in action. The combat system is simple to get into but has a lot of depth and subtlety that becomes clear as you play more. The AI plays a mean game too, attacking in groups, retreating units from the front line to heal and so on. I have no previous expossure to Warhammer other than playing Dawn of War years ago but I've had a lot of fun with this regardless.

I don't think much of the Cube Rule for food, it seems to get a lot of things wrong. The Sandwich Alignment Chart makes a lot more sense!

Thanks for the tips. I haven't got a permanent solution yet, but I have a process monitor Google app to close Alexa down easily which is good enough. There's some talk of rooting or at least disabling the factory bloatware online, but unless it's easy and going to stick permanently I don't know if I have the energy to do it.

I really like my Fire HD10, and still think it was great value. I have a couple of recent niggles though. An update or two ago, mine started to show the advert lockscreen more often. Sometimes when you press the lock screen button, it shows an advert instead of turning the screen off and you have to hit the button again to switch off. Also if I'm awake into the early hours, I've seen the device wake up and show an advert when noone has gone near it.

More annoyingly, for the past month the CPU is permanently maxed so the device gets hot and needs charging a lot. It turns out the Alexa and Prime Video processes max the CPU, despite the fact that I have Alexa disabled and never launched Prime. You can force stop the processes to fix the problem but they restart sometimes. I never rooted or jailbroke the device, so I have to wonder how many people are getting the same issues.

If you want a CCG that you can play single player at your own pace, this is the pick for me. I'm at 223 hours and I didn't spend a penny yet... I'm at the point where I feel I owe them something out of goodwill. It's a close imitation/hybrid of Magic and Hearthstone, with just enough changes to keywords and mechanics to be legally distinct! The arena and draft modes are free and you get new cards at a decent rate versus AI. The biggest downside is that decks are 75 cards - I've never shaken the feeling of taking a nice tight 60 card Magic deck and then diluting it with 15 cards. Still though, I built about 10 decks for myself and had a bunch of fun with them.

As someone competent with computers, and underwhelming in social and physical skills, I always thought of myself as a bit of a nerd. I straddle the line at the very least. I'm delighted to hear that I have in fact been a testament to masculinity the whole time!

In all seriousness though, I feel like this study is pretty poisonous. There are definitely problems associated with males dominating computer fields and careers. Organisations that are used to having all-male staff can gets used to catering to men and become unwelcoming to women. I'm guessing being the only woman on a male team can be pretty unfun sometimes. And of course there's the possibility of bad behaviour bubbling up with no women around to keep the guys in check. Laddishness can cross the line into sexism pretty easily.

This study though... I can't escape the conclusion that the author is targeting the act of "using a computer while male." If a guy taking his 8 year old to work and playing a video games already qualifies as a problem, then everything qualifies it seems. I will never be onboard with this kind of thinking, I think it's a product of identity politics going too far. The author seems to be from the group of people that see the world through the prism of privileged and disadvantaged groups, and believe in directly intervening by condemning the 'winning' group and having them hand something over until equity is achieved. Besides being unfair to the individual and unproductive (moving away from awarding merit) - to me it's a form of coercion.

A far better away to address a perceived inequality is via equal opportunity. Encourage women to aim for STEM subjects while in education. Tech fields are the most welcoming and supportive to women they have ever been and are continuing to improve. Organisations absolutely understand that having a balance of sexes is a healthy thing to be doing these days, especially in technology fields. If more women enter the field, the field will be directly changed for the better in the near future. It's a far more effective and healthy way to go about things rather than listen to people like this who just deal in blanket condemnation.

ZiggyD posted a pretty fair video after 20 hours of beta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLOpHNoudM4

I've watched a fair bit of him playing in coop, there are some good bits in there along with a lot of issues. When you strip everything else away, you can explore a Fallout world and play Fallout quests together with your mates. That alone is going to make it worth it for some people. The locations I've seen are often good looking and the world seems to be very large.

On the bad side, it's an extremely shoddy PC port, there are numerous bugs apparent already (I saw a couple different quests break, and multiple issues getting people into the same instance, friended and partied up.) The fact that so much seems to be client side strikes me as a catastrophic lack of game security - I have no idea how they are going to stay on top of cheating.

Lastly, despite the measures taken the gameplay does seem to be susceptible to PvP griefing. If you build a couple base buildings for an income, then a couple of stronger players arrive, what are you going to do? They can steal the items your machines are making and become wanted, but if you engage them they will kick your ass. And you respawn 50 metres away so the situation remains. As far as I can see, other players can still disrupt whatever you have going on in the world, and if they are too strong it seems you have to move on elsewhere and hope they don't follow you.

So if you are pretty lucky/successful at avoiding the issues, there is some fun in there to be had, but I still feel like this game has a lot of problems and is overpriced for what it offers.

I saw ZiggyD play some of the beta and it was pretty underwhelming. There might be some appeal to the Fallout setting and world exploration for a while, but I think the novelty of that will be short-lived. Unless you are super dedicated to making your own fun, I think after that the game will just feel like the usual survival PvP mechanics in an old engine and won't really have anything to distinguish itself.

RedEye9 wrote on Oct 27, 2018, 13:13:
The edge browser has but one purpose: to download an alternate browser

On that subject, according to Forbes today, top Bing results for 'download Chrome' link to packages of Chrome with malware.

You must be talking of the mighty Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker!

Now that I think of it, what ever happened to Virtual Pool 4? I remember 3 had a decent version of snooker in it although the AI didn't really manage the position of the reds like a pro snooker player does.

I remember with 4 there were controversies about a subscription model, and always on DRM and then I don't recall ever hearing of it again, and never heard of anyone owning it or playing it online. Did it flop?