Video Games

Man, until you made that correction, I was half reading this thread and saw that you're a Diablo fan and liked TBS games. I was thinking, "Boy, do I have the perfect combination for you!" Board games are the ultimate turn-based strategy games, lol.

Blizzard made a chess and mahjong set from Diablo III and Reaper of Souls. Weird, I know, but awesome nonetheless.

 

Exactly this. I don't normally pre-order anything and wait at least a month or so after release. I still do make exceptions (like Diablo 4). However, the same releases on PC tend to be less problematic so it isn't as much of a gamble. Cyberpunk comes to mind. I grabbed that one about 3 weeks after release, and I had zero issues the ensuing 6 months or so that I spent on it. Granted that one was built on PC straight-up and wasn't a port, but that still generally holds true even with ports.

Single-player games are also less risky as they don't have to account for server load that they somehow always seem to never learn and can't handle the capacity up front. I have my conspiracy theories on that, but I won't get into it.

But in the end, these days I'm also selective with what I play and tend to stay on a game for months at a time, if not longer. I still play Fallout 4, for example.

Edit: Correction, updated the above to "after" release.

 

I played my share of Battletech back in the day.

I saw that set some time back on Amazon. I thought about getting it as my son and I played D3 a lot and I was going to pick that up as a father-son gift. But I ended up getting this Harry Potter chess set instead:

 

Yikes. The ol' BBS days. I haven't thought about that in years. Where's the sysop when you need him?!!

We used to use a BBS system to communicate for setting up lan parties in the ol' dial-up days. 28.8 modems were the bomb!

 

That is a classy set. One thing I wished Blizzard did with the D3 set was add a board. It only came with the pieces.

 

Ah. I don't remember for sure, but that might have been the reason why I opted for the HP set instead.

 

Waiting impatiently for it to release on Xbox.

 

I caved.

23 hrs 49 min... sigh

 

14 minutes late but I’m in!

 

Nice. I have to wait on the linux / steam deck reviews to hit protondb.

 

Well I'm an idiot. I doubled my RAM and also picked up a 2 TB m.2 drive so that I don't have to uninstall anything, although not necessarily for this game. But I got it all setup last night and installed the game after having almost forgotten I even bought the m.2 a couple of weeks ago to begin with.

And then I completely forgot about doing this:

 

Looking forward to some serious
starfield

 

Starfield? Never heard of her.

 

I got a good hour and a half in. Playing as a Ronin because it's the closest thing that matches me in real life.

Made sure to pick He/Him pronouns. What the fuck is the world coming to? Also picked the first "walk" so I don't shake my butt like a girl when attacking space pirates.

Make sure you go in and check your skills right away. Instead of just banking a skill, it has a challenge to complete. I didn't realize that and now I have to go hunt down more space pirates to chop apart to meet my hand-to-hand quota.

I think it has a lot of potential.

 

Well, why not make him a she? I like female characters. If there's an option, I'd rather watch a female model wiggle her butt for the next 100 hours I'm playing.

Also, c'mon. Screenshots!!

 

Well then this is just for you. I'm still on the character creation screen and decided to start with a female character. Kind of an ongoing joke over the years. I try to make female characters look like the wife (except she has blond hair). And then I say to her it's the only way I can control her when she sees me playing lol. Except good luck checking out the booty in that suit.

Spoiler

 

That's pretty cool! Does she ever get undressed?(the heavy suit I mean)

Yknow what's interesting? They actually made face asymmetrical because human faces don't resemble perfect symmetry!

 

From this. It has already lost a lot of potential.

Thanks,

 

Yeah, the wife can talk that face/body asymmetrical biz all day. She was a dancer turned artist/painter.

Here's the body type selection screen.

Spoiler

 

That is super neat! Even has walk style! Thank you for sharing!

 

You have the option to change the viewfrom first to 3rd person. I play first person so I guess it wouldn’t matter but I’m a dude so it’s a dude.

 

Oof. Not looking good so far.
https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740?device=steamDeck

But maybe there is hope.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/09/steam-deck-os-349-released-with-gpu-fix-for-starfield/

Give it a week, till official 9/5 launch and we shall see.

Until then I can still explore the video game stars in No Man's Sky. They just released another free major update.

 

Details look good on the suits, but this is only 2 mins into the game so nothing really scenic yet. But my biggest complaint is NO HDR on PC, and colors and lighting that are normally vibrant in HDR appear washed out.

 

I played for another hour last night and I am enjoying it. The space flight is pretty cool. You have to divert power from your weapons, etc, to be able to power your jump drive. The weapons are pretty awesome and plentiful.

The pronouns haven’t come into play yet and it didn’t bother me that it was there. It’s just that I think the whole pronoun thing is stupid in general but I’m a 50 year-old playing video games. Maybe I’m just cranky. However, if it somehow makes somebody feel included, then I’m for it.

 

I liked the space combat aspect, as well. Not quite a sim really, but still has the feel, and enough so that I'll bust out the flight stick and throttle tonight. But even then, I initially just piloted/battled with a mouse/kb and even that was sufficient, as weird as that might sound.

I don't care for the pronouns, either. But it's probably also there for marketing reasons. They don't want to lose $$. Before release, I saw questions/concerns flying around on forums about there only being 2 genders, so no doubt the pronouns aren't just trying to be respectfully inclusive as they still have to watch over their bottom line if such things are a concern to people on deciding whether or not to buy a game. At least IMO.

 

Kings Bounty: The Legend - Free on GoG for the next 66 hours.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/kings_bounty_the_legend

 

^^ ... and Diablo IV is having a Mother's Blessing Weekend for 25% increased bonus XP & gold. It's like they knew Starfield was getting an early release, but they didn't want you to forget about them.

 

Nope, fartself thinks it's pretty stupid too.

 

<Goes and looks up "fartself">....

<But still doesn't know what "fartself" is>