Gwardinen

In fairness, the limit to Windows 10 is the one part of this that isn't just strategy. DirectX 12 currently only works on Windows 10.

Which incidentally also has a pretty good intro.

There's probably something Alan Tudyk can't sell me on, but I haven't seen it yet. This does remind me that I bought Galactic Civilizations III while it was in early access and have still pretty much not played it, though.

I've been trying to decide whether I want to watch Son of Saul for a while now. I've heard such positive things about it (from an execution standpoint, rather than "enjoyment") and I think it could be a film that's really worth watching, but I have such an up and down history with the Holocaust that I'm not sure I can handle it at the moment. Between learning about it in history class, watching Band of Brothers for the first time, finally visiting the concentration camp at Dachau near my family's home, etc. it always seems to pop up at times in my life when I'm trying to figure out whether I still consider myself German, what that means, whether things like the rise of Naziism (?) and the Holocaust have any bearing on my identity, and so on. Anyway, without going into too much detail about my specific psychology, Son of Saul is definitely the poster film at the moment for the phenomenon of a work that seems like it almost carries a moral imperative to be experienced, but at the same time you just know is not going to make for a fun evening.

Yeah that's pretty great. In my last mission I managed to mind control a Gatekeeper, and it was hilariously unstoppable.

I buy that. I very much enjoy muesli with yoghurt, although I've never tried it with banana and flax seeds, and the only soy thing I eat is chocolate soya pudding. Today was an outlier breakfast day for me - waffles with Nutella.

Ah. Is Psi also shown on the stats screen or do the amps just provide a boost to Will as well? Because I swear I saw a number go up when I equipped the better amp.

Yeah, I didn't by any means mean to suggest that criticising XCOM 2 on Twitter is something that makes you a jerk. This has been my perspective on Jonathan Blow for a long time, and it wasn't his critique but rather his patronising response to Dualhammers that reminded me of it - even that response would not have been enough to form that opinion, though, as I said it was just a reminder. That said, Chris is right that I basically agree with him. I don't think it's a particularly big problem that (I think that) Jonathan Blow is a jerk. I also think Christian Bale is a jerk but I still like the Dark Knight. He can still be good at what he does, and indeed can still be a positive force in the industry - and I think making interesting games that are about different goals and require different skills from us than the usual is a way to be a positive force. As I said, the only thing I find remarkable is that we seemed to skip the hand-wringing period altogether with him. I don't know whether it's a sign of any shift in the community or just an anomaly, but it's stuck out to me when I see him interact with people.

Yeah, Jonathan Blow is a jerk. This has been clear to me for a number of years and the only thing that's surprising about it is how easily the video game community accepted it. Usually in the industrialised world we have a little bit of time during which we wring our hands about a creator who is "difficult" but makes something we like/find interesting, before accepting it and enjoying the thing with the occasional "but the creator, eesh" comment thrown in down the line. I may sound dismissive, but actually I think this is generally the healthy way to go about these things - it is totally possible to enjoy something that is problematic, and it's definitely possible to enjoy something that's made by a problematic person. Hell, if it wasn't we'd never get to enjoy anything because everyone is "difficult" somehow. Anyway, either I missed it, or this simply never happened with Jonathan Blow. We pretty much instantly allowed for the fact that he's a jerk that makes interesting things. He is the House of video games.

I think it does, because the advanced psi emitter thingy increases the Will of the soldier when equipped.

I agree with both your positive and negative points, but I'm curious as to what you mean by the "Deadpoolization of the cosplay scene"? Is it literally that a bunch of people are cosplaying as Deadpool?

I liked Viking way more than I expected to, back in the day. It's not, you know, a good game, but there's something compelling about it.

Pretty well done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvcc8KVTc4

Plague Inc: Evolved is officially released from early access on Steam tomorrow. It now has a head-to-head multiplayer mode, and from tomorrow it'll have a cooperative mode. I haven't played in a fair while, but I'd quite like to get back into it with some other Thumbs! Anyone else interested in either racing to infect the world or working together to do so?

Wait, you mean flying over each individual building and doing experiments? That would be some tricky flying in a rocket!

No, that's all probably smart. I haven't been particularly diligent about doing all my scientific experiments at every altitude so far. The Science mode sounds good apart from the fact that the contracts give me goals - I don't particularly care about money and reputation systems, but having the contracts gives me an idea about what I should be shooting for next.

Yeah this series has actually gotten me back into Kerbal Space Program. I'm trying a career mode right now and frankly I'm struggling to regularly get into stable orbit with the starting equipment. I dunno whether I'm making piloting errors or whether the starting stuff really is just not very good. Also I don't even have the ability to add manoeuvres and plot that stuff out yet - does anyone know what piece of gear lets you do that?

Wait, there are vampires in hell?

For the record the continent bonuses are not set. In my game the NA continent bonus is "All In". I'd be curious to know whether that is always on the continent you start on, though?

But you're an underground organisation, so it's not like you can take it to the dry cleaners between owners.

I don't necessarily remember whether season two was bad or not, but I couldn't agree more about the marriage. Especially in teen dramas like this where a great deal of the show revolves around people making bad relationship decisions and misunderstandings spiralling out of control, it's really cool to see two people genuinely trying to make it work. It's not always perfect, but they actually try and they do so in a mature, believable way. Weirdly, the closest relation I can think of is the marriage between Sandy and Kirsten Cohen in the OC, but that show hasn't aged as well in other ways.

Design considerations on what things should be universal and what should be singular aside, I just don't understand why the UI doesn't clearly communicate which is which when you're building them. Both this game and XCOM: EU have the weirdest split of excellent UI design and awful UI design.

Oh I totally didn't pick up that that's what you had meant by not being able to refill your team whenever you wanted. I thought you'd just run out of supplies or something. Yeah, it would definitely be hard to do anything without buying new recruits at the start of the game. I haven't done this Codex thing you guys are talking about because I've kind of been stalling the main missions a bit, but now I'm kinda scared. I already let the Avatar project get into countdown to apocalypse mode once! I'm still scraping by in missions but I think I may be headed for a campaign loss if things keep going this way. I never have enough supplies to get the equipment I need at this point, so I think even my missions are going to go south soon. Also I failed my last mission to act against a Dark Event so I think I'm going to have 2-3 dark event results this month.

What are we counting as the tutorial? I mean obviously in the mission in which you rescue yourself, almost everyone dies and you have no choice about it. I don't really remember the next few missions, if I'm honest. Also, what difficulty are you playing on? I don't think I remember stun lancers for the first few missions. Yeah, I get that all the time.

While I agree that XCOM 2 feels fairly brutal at times - possibly even more so than Enemy Unknown - I think you're going to be a lot happier if you stop trying to play the game with 0 fatalities, especially early on. My memorial wall already has at least a dozen names on it, but at this point I have a pretty solid core of Sergeant level soldiers, and even a couple of Lieutenants, and it definitely feels manageable. I think the designers intended for us to accept the losses and keep rolling, and doing so is certainly not hurting my enjoyment of the game.