I wasn’t playing it, but I watched the 25 minute walkthrough of the new Portal ‘game’ for the new SteamDeck. It was amusing.
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Heardle.
So far I’m getting about one in every five or six songs.
Edit: What drives me nuts - and today’s one did this - is when you skip and the next “clue” is is just the same riff played again. Today’s did that four at least four skips.
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I had some rare free time and gave Dice Legacy a try. I tried it on Switch: Many of my complaints may matter less on other platforms. It was on sale.
It’s a fun idea. Basically it’s a common-ish mechanic for tabletop games where special fancy dice equate to the ‘classes’ of characters in your band as you do stuff. A die is essentially a ‘worker’ in the context of a ‘worker placement game’ with the twist that you might need a specific face rolled to use the worker in a specific ‘socket.’ Like there’s a “gathering” action, and dice with that action can be used on forest tiles (to harvest lumber) but not on a field (which takes a different ‘harvest’ action). You an upgrade those device: Initially you have Peasant dice which can be upgraded to Citizens, Soldiers, and others: Soldiers don’t have any Harvest/Gather actions on their dice, but have lots of Swords (which Peasants have 1) and such, and even a single Build.
The first oddity is that Dice have ‘endurance’ which is a number that has to be tracked, so breaking the ‘tabletop’ paradigm. Dice that are assigned a task or re-rolled lose a point of endurance, while assigning them to the Cookhouse (and giving them a Food) restores a bunch. It’s pretty manageable, but odd. It feels like something added initially to reduce frustration, which can occur.
You place a die or two in a building, maybe “authorize” use of a resource or two, and then there’s a countdown to the location doing it’s thing, which produces resources.
The bad stuff is that there’s a lot of buildings and they look surprisingly identical. You need the pop-ups to tell various buildings apart. There’s a bit of “twitch” in that you have to toss Sword dice at attackers and such.
The Switch controls are poor at best. One ‘feature’ of the game is that it’s played on a Ringworld, which from the bit I’ve played is mostly a justification to be played as a narrow ‘strip’ of land to be explored and conquered. Still, the ‘ring’ is up-down and you need to move around on it a lot, so it’s mapped to the L-R trigger buttons. The number of times I’ve hit the wrong button is high.
I love the idea and want to go back to it… Definitely not until I’ve unpacked the Switch Dock as it’s very small on the built-in screen.I think an issue is I need to get into sync with the ‘speed’ of play the game expects. It’s not a slow, patient game, but nor is it a twitch game.
I bought an Oculus Quest 2 for work. Really. It allows me to have huge virtual monitors when in reality all I have is a laptop on a portable table.
I ended up buying Beat Saber, though, and I’m addicted. I’ve always been a music junkie, and I love to dance, so this gives me a way to do that. Most of the stock music is meh, but they do have a few extra music packs that you can buy, including one from BTS, so I’m happy. You know it’s fun when you’re sweating and still saying, “Just one more song.”
Edit: Not all of those steps and activity minutes are from Beat Saber. I also moved my bed out and finished emptying the bedrooms.
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Huh, that sounds like a big brain moment there, using a VR headset for huge monitors. Man, I can honestly see that as the new thing my kids will use when they’re in high school or something. Assuming VR doesn’t go away.
Related, I started playing Division 2 some weeks ago because I got tired of grinding for gear with the first Division (I still love the game, will probably grind again later this year). Apart from the crashes, it’s been a fun experience.
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I managed to get a really old computer running again with Windows 98SE. How old is it? It uses IDE cables for the hard drive and DVD drives. Some of the hardware can’t find the right driver to install. I had forgotten what a headache that used to be.
I won’t be able to use it for everything I wanted, but at least it should be a usable older games computer since Serious Sam worked on it. I never realized that Croteam slipped in The Terminator drumbeat: “Dah-dum dump-a-dump, da-dum dump-a-dump”.
Now to see if this other computer that’s just a motherboard inside a case has enough horsepower to be the basis of a passable NAS.
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Well, that was unexpected. I think that may have been the Windows XP computer that died before. Moved the solitary 2GB memory stick to a different slot and it boots. Then after I plugged the hard drive back in that had the OS, everything came back up.
It looks like it used to be a PVR and video editing computer, so I’m going to play with it some more and see if maybe I can start transferring what I recorded on VHS tape. I have boxes of them sitting in storage.
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We have our regular Pathfinder game set for 1 p.m. this afternoon. We’ve been told to prepare the 10th level version of our characters (something’s stopped us from leveling even though we have enough XP) and I just realised that my copy of PCGen, and likely my 9th level save file is on my old laptop, which is at the house, while my new laptop and I are at my dad’s place. I’ve loaded PCGen on the new laptop, so it’s time to start rebuilding the character from scratch. At least I have my Roll20 character sheet to go off of.
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Deep Rock Galactic.
Stupid grindy fun with my daughter, perfect to not think about canine death.
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Dorfromantik on Steam. The sort of game you’ll want to play when you just want something to keep you occupied.
Any idea where they slipped it in?
Got SS on GOG.com as well as Duke Nukem.
The drumbeat plays during the Valley of the Kings mission.
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The 2018 Harebrained Schemes Battletech is pretty good. Tactical giant robot fighting with a fun “campaign” system that matches the IP well: for example, flying to another planet takes time (probably less than it should) and time traveling is time you’re not earning money to make the monthly payroll for your mercenary company.
Apparently mods make it insane, but I’m playing the single player campaign which is basically grinding to find new stuff and improve pilots between doing the plot missions.
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One of the problems I’ve had with the Battletech computer games is how they emphasize the fighting and ignore the economics. Sure, build that 95 tonner with the 380xl engine that cost 25,593,100 Cbills. For the same cost, you could field a lance of smaller, more agile mechs than can Wolfpack the big one. Nice to see they’re finally taking that into consideration.
The Roguetech mod let’s this happen to a certain extent. Including VTOLs, tanks, and Elementals. But, it’s on the Unity engine and there is a massive memory leak in the base game that mods make worse.
Also, a more realistic lance is that 95 tonner with 3 other 80+ ton mechs. Now 3 or 4 lances of lights will get pasted against that. And even if they win the battle will likely have multiple dead or injured pilots and several scrapped mechs, vs the Assault lance which became combat ineffective and pulled out after maybe losing one mech and pilot. It’s a fun scenario to game, but with 4 assaults deleting 2 or 3 mechs a turn (Possibly fewer but RNG takes over here, and it could be more) the lights often lose.
OTOH, 2 heavy lances using inner sphere tech could beat an assault star of Clan mechs for a third of the price. But as a mech company that’s still a losing proposition. I try to run heavies with a lance of mediums and vehicles.
If my IQ would be 155 for solving this puzzle, then what would my ranking be for identifying that the amount of trapped water isn’t sufficient to cool molten lava, or that even if it could cool all of the lava without changing into steam, the heat from the lava should kill the character, or that the armor he’s wearing makes it unlikely he’ll be able to fit through the passage to retrieve the treasure?
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Well, they get two point back in their favor, based on new ads. Within the game, an amount of water can immediately cool an equal amount of lava. And even if lava does flow into the area where the character is standing, it causes him pain but not instant death.
Is the game even actually about the at? I’d heard a lot of the ‘mobile game ads’ were usually dumb puzzles that weren’t even present in the games, which were often low-effort Match 3 and similar.
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Who knows, looks like angry ovary vs. happy ovary to me.